Network Critical Selected as a 2012 Red Herring Top 100 Europe Award Winner!

Network Critical selected as a 2012 Red Herring Top 100 Europe
Amsterdam, Netherlands – Red Herring announced its Top 100 award in recognition of the leading private companies from Europe, celebrating these startups’ innovations and technologies across their respective industries.
Red Herring’s Top 100 Europe list has become a mark of distinction for identifying promising new companies and entrepreneurs. Red Herring editors were among the first to recognize that companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Skype, Salesforce.com, YouTube, and eBay would change the way we live and work.
“Choosing the companies with the strongest potential was by no means a small feat,” said Alex Vieux, publisher and CEO of Red Herring. “After rigorous contemplation and discussion, we narrowed our list down from hundreds of candidates from across Europe to the Top 100 Winners. We believe Network Critical embodies the vision, drive and innovation that define a successful entrepreneurial venture. Network Critical should be proud of its accomplishment, as the competition was the strongest it has ever been.”
Red Herring’s editorial staff evaluated the companies on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, technology innovation, management quality, strategy, and market penetration. This assessment of potential is complemented by a review of the track record and standing of startups relative to their peers, allowing Red Herring to see past the “buzz” and make the list a valuable instrument of discovery and advocacy for the most promising new business models in Europe.

Overcoming Sales Myopia

Myopia is the word optometrist’s use for “shortsightedness.” You can see up close but the big, far away picture is a blur. Metaphorically, many sales professionals suffer from this myopia when developing solutions for their hard fought prospects and customers.

You cold call. You network. You follow-up leads. You attend trade shows. You advertise. You prospect. These activities fill your day in the hopes of finding another new account. Then you talk about problems and solutions. You make presentations. You handle objections. You buy lunch. You get engineers involved. You fend off competing solutions. You negotiate pricing, delivery and support. Finally, you get an order!

Needless to say, there is a lot of work on the path between prospect and order. So, when you finally get the order you want to make it a big as possible. What if you could add 10% or 15% to every order you close? That is a relatively small percentage but it can add up over the course of a year or a career. That extra revenue per sale could be just enough to get you on the Top Performer list, to get you that Hawaii trip or even to put you into the next tax bracket.

Think about how much work goes into getting a sale. So, once you are “in the door” you have to ask yourself, “How can I broaden the solution to get the maximum amount of this customer’s budget in my order book?” Adding Network Access to your design is an often overlooked revenue enhancer that is simple, quick and solution neutral.

The prospect may be adding nodes, tightening security, enhancing monitoring or upgrading technology. They are focusing on the initial application for which the budget was approved. This is where the savvy sales pro has an opportunity to create extra value, strengthen the solution, create competitive barriers and increase the size of the order.

Taps and Network Access products are necessary elements to implement many IT projects. However, they are often not given much thought in the design process. By discussing taps and access devices early, and adding them into the design, you can differentiate your proposal while increasing your revenue opportunity. Taps are broadly used so you can add them into a wide variety of applications. Once familiar with their use, you will find these products to be a simple and lucrative addition to your product portfolio. While taps are likely not what the prospect is initially asking for, there is a good chance that, if you bring it up, you will find that they will be needed somewhere in the project design.

Spending a little time with a tap vendor like Network Critical can help you increase your sales revenue and strengthen your position as a valuable consultant to your customers. You can learn more about taps and network access devices at http://www.networkcritical.com.

Being short sighted about solution development is a sales trap that is easy to fix. Look beyond the requested application and offer a complete solution. Sharpen your network access vision and you can grow revenue with every sale.

VoIP – The New DT

By: Dan O’Donnell

When I was working for the telephone company in the monopoly days we used to joke when Telecom Managers gave us a difficult time. We said to them, “You know that hum in your ear when you pick up the telephone? You want to keep it, don’t you?” The underlying threat being, I have the power to take away your Dial Tone.

Well, the monopoly days are long gone. New technology has created a variety of solutions to get that hum in your ear. In fact, when using mobile devices, there is no dial tone at all. Through all this change, however, there is one constant…there is no tolerance for unreliable service. Over the years, the monopoly phone system has created an expectation for five nines reliability, 99.999% uptime.

Advances in speed and reliability of the internet over the years provide a good network for VoIP calling. Mixing voice, data, video and mobile calling on the same IP network, however, presents some unique challenges.

Voice calls have no tolerance for delay and require packets to arrive in the same order as they were sent whereas most data protocols can tolerate various levels of delay. Having these different protocols running on the same network requires unique priority assignments for different applications called Quality of Service (QoS) designations.

Security is another issue that must be addressed on VoIP networks. VoIP systems are open to attacks just like any other device or end point connected to the internet. Further, different types of security devices are often needed for voice and data services.

Managing VoIP networks can be very efficient. As noted above, though, they also have special monitoring, management and security requirements. Fortunately, there are many specialized appliances available to provide these services. The critical foundation for cost effective and efficient VoIP management is a flexible access management system. All links should be monitored and managed. All links thus require multiple appliances. Developing a sound monitoring strategy is necessary to provide the reliability, availability and control needed for VoIP networks while helping manage the appliance costs.

Next generation network access systems can aggregate multiple links into a single appliance. Because VoIP links have lower bandwidth requirements, the aggregation ratio can be very high allowing significant CAPEX savings on expensive appliances. Another cost and efficiency feature of access devices is filtering. This allows the attached appliances to only process targeted protocols, further reducing throughput to the monitoring device and allowing more efficient operation.

Using the internet for voice, data, video and mobile communications is very efficient. Developing a monitoring strategy built around a next generation network access solution such as the AFS by Network Critical, will provide the foundation for high performance, high availability, robust security and reduced cost.

For more information about the AFS and Network Critical go to www.networkcritical.com.

Mobulation Explosion

By: Dan O’Donnell

I will take credit here for coining a new word, “mobulation.” I hope mobulation will someday be added to Webster’s Dictionary and make me famous. In the mean time, I will write some thoughts about the pending mobulation explosion.

Let’s start with a clear definition. Mobulation is the population of mobile network connected devices including cell phones, smart phones, tablets and laptops. The mobulation explosion is my term for the incredible growth in mobile devices and the network traffic they create. Cisco predicts that by the end of 2012 there will be more mobile devices than people on this earth we all share. This prediction will have a near term critical impact on the networking industry. The report is the Cisco Visual Networking Index: Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2011 – 2016.

As more phones are put into service, more data will be generated. However, in addition to phone traffic, smart mobile devices are generating data and video traffic at a much greater rate. Here are some interesting numbers:
• Smartphones represent only 12 percent of global handsets in use today but they use over 82 percent of total handset traffic.
• The number of mobile-connected tablets tripled in 2011 to 34 million. Each tablet generates 3.4 times the network traffic than the average smartphone.
• Mobile connected laptops generate 22 times more traffic than smartphones. Mobile data traffic per laptop was 2.1GB per month, up 46 percent from 2010.
• Global mobile data traffic will increase 18-fold between 2011 and 2016 reaching 10.8 exabytes per month. (1 exabyte = 1 quintillion bytes or 10¹⁸ bytes)

These numbers remind me of when I was taking Astronomy in college. It is difficult to comprehend the magnitude of the numbers. Imagine, though, what will happen to network traffic when smartphones represent 40% of the global handset market. Imagine the mobile data traffic loads when the tablet market, which is still very young, matures to ubiquity.

These events will have enormous impact on today’s networks and not just for service providers. As smart mobile devices blur the line between corporate and private data traffic, the increased throughput will impact enterprise as well as carrier networks. New strategies will be needed for network monitoring, management and security. More specialized and faster appliances will be required to protect corporate assets and keep confidential information secured.

The glue holding all these appliances together is the network access device. A well-planned monitoring strategy built around permanent network access equipment will help keep appliance port costs down and maintain high network availability. The AFS by Network Critical is one example of this foundational piece for network monitoring and security. The AFS provides access, aggregation, filtering and load-balanced distribution in a small 1U package.

The experts at Network Critical are working with enterprise and carrier clients every day designing intelligent, next generation access strategies. The Mobulation Explosion is happening now. Do not wait until your network is overwhelmed by an onslaught of mobile data traffic. Plan your high speed/high availability network access strategy now.

Virtually Simple

By Dan O’Donnell

Live simple. What a nice concept. Our lives in the technology industry, however, seem to be all about conquering the complicated rather than pursuing the simple.

Mobility, virtualization, more data, faster links, new applications and increasing vulnerability all require complex and sophisticated systems to manage and protect networks. Virtualized Desktop Infrastructure growth is increasing bandwidth requirements. Appliances are becoming more specialized so more are required. Connecting the tools without impacting network availability and managing all the appliances at 10Gbps link speeds is now becoming its own specialty.

A Gartner report, “Emerging Technology Analysis: Hosted Virtual Desktops” says the number of virtual desktops worldwide will increase to 66 million by 2014. While this growth of virtual technology is efficient for businesses, it adds complexity to network and application management. The need for greater visibility into network performance and application performance will increase just as dramatically as the growth of network bandwidth and virtual desktops.

Boiling it all down, there is a need to pursue simplicity in this ever more complicated environment. Time spent chasing network issues when the problem is with an application is time wasted. Time spent drilling down through layers and layers of analysis on 10Gbps link traffic can be frustrating while clients are experiencing outages or response time issues. Resolving performance issues proactively and optimizing network performance are more worthy pursuits than troubleshooting problems.

A side note on the business perspective of simple proactive network management…A team focused on trouble shooting is considered a cost center. A team focused on improving network performance and IT ROI is considered a strategic asset to the company.

So, in pursuit of a simple answer, what about a unified system providing end-to-end performance visibility across the network, allowing quick isolation of the root cause of performance issues? What about a solution that solves complex application issues simply? What about a couple of simple tools that are easy to deploy and take only a few RUs of rack space? What about connecting all your 1Gbps links through a port aggregator rolling them up to a few high-speed links for consolidated management? What about proactive network management, resolving issues before the clients even notice problems?

The Network Critical AFS port aggregator and the Visual Networks VPM Xpress 10G combine to provide a complete yet simple solution for link aggregation, network and application management. The AFS and Xpress solution allows network managers in virtual environments, carrier and cloud networks an efficient, simple solution to proactive network and application management.

Simple is good. Follow the links below for more information:

View the Network Critical AFS port aggregator here
Download the Network Critical Aggregating Filtering System (AFS) datasheet here
View the Visual Networks VPM Xpress 10G here
Download the Visual Networks VPM Xpress brochure here

Get Noticed in 2012

By: Dan O’Donnell

Remember Rodney Dangerfield, the comedian whose signature line was “I don’t get no respect.” Those with jobs in IT, Cyber Security, Networking and the like know the feeling. When things go right (which takes a lot of dedication, specialized knowledge and hard work) nobody notices. When things go wrong (which can happen no matter how hard you work to keep things humming) the entire company is screaming like a banshee on steroids. Suddenly, everyone knows your name.

Sales guys get noticed when they sell things. They get trips to Tahiti, awards and a lot of positive recognition. Marketing develops programs and ads that are creative and widely publicized. Engineering develops cool designs that turn into products everyone can see. Even the guys from Finance are always making charts and presentations to the CEO showing their ROI calculations and how to finance new projects.

How can IT and Networking demonstrate their positive contributions to the organization? The key is to look at your job in a new way. Categorize, quantify and report on your contributions. Network Security, for example, keeps bad things from happening that could ruin a company. Theft of confidential customer information, leakage of classified product designs, external hacks that slow or block system access are a few examples of bad things that the Network Security group helps prevent. When things go right these issues do not exist so it is hard to quantify the contributions. However, there are industry reports that track these trends that can be used to set baselines.

Using the Network Security example, a department head can develop a set of indices setting Key Performance Indicators based on industry norms for a variety of network and security metrics. Then correlate the economic impact of meeting and exceeding these metrics. What you will have is a report that shows the ongoing financial benefit that sound security practices and procedures can bring to the company every day. Remember, money not spent, is profit.

The idea here is to quantify and report on the positive contributions that are made every day. Take the technical jargon out of the reports. Resist the urge to discuss the benefits of dual stack routers for IPv6 conversion (save that for departmental meetings). The CEO is less interested in how you do it but keenly interested in the contribution to the bottom line. The CEO is a business person and his/her interest is shareholder return. Show that your ideas are necessary to protect the company brand, to create revenue, or to reduce risk and liability.

Finally, be proactive with these ideas. Develop your business oriented reports and ask for time to present. In 2012, resolve to take a quarterly trip in the elevator to the top floor. Show your value to the company. Perhaps, you too, will be on a plane to Tahiti with the Sales leaders.

The Year of the Tap

By: Dan O’Donnell

Welcome to 2012. As the technology parade winds its way down Main Street, pay attention to the little float called Tap and Access. It has been in the parade for a number of years but fresh flowers and new designs are causing a buzz in the curbside crowd.

During the last four years or so, there has been a quiet storm brewing in network monitoring solutions. The tap market has been growing dramatically. The primary driver for this architectural revolution has been broad market acceptance of taps as a permanent architectural element in network monitoring and management solutions.

Why are networks so universally transitioning from Span ports to tap solutions? Here are a few ideas:

• Too few Span ports – With the introduction of many specialized network appliances that all need 24/7 link access, there are not enough Span ports to go around
• In-Line Access – Many new security appliances provide network protection by taking immediate action to resolve threats. These appliances are installed risk-free on network links by connecting through reliable, hardware-based In-Line taps. This method of connecting active appliances is often called a “Virtual In-Line” connection.
• Data Switching and Port Aggregation – As link speed migrates from 100Mbps to 1Gbps to 10Gbps and beyond, there is an increasing need to aggregate multiple lower speed links up to higher end tools. Conversely, there is also a need to distribute core high speed access to multiple lower speed links. These port switching devices provide many sophisticated access features and take their input from taps on the links. This practice provides risk free fail-safe access to the links while the data switches manage and distribute the traffic.
• Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFW) – This will be a big, big, big transition for 2012. Next Gen Firewalls are ready for prime time. These new versions of firewalls are addressing the more sophisticated threat environment with higher level visibility and control and will be the perimeter security cornerstone of networks. The transition is underway now and the best practice for NGFW connectivity is using In-Line taps.

Network Critical, a global innovator of permanent, modular taps and high speed data switches, aggregators and load balancers, is leading the network access revolution. Tap solutions from simple access to complex aggregation and distribution architectures can be found in the Network Critical product portfolio.

As network operators develop plans for upgrading to NGFW, high speed port aggregation, In-Line security appliances and other specialized access applications, Network Critical will be supporting their access requirements.

Taps and access devices may not be the Grand Marshall of the technology parade in 2012, but the tap market may very well win the Sweepstakes Trophy for fastest growing support technology. Happy New Year!

2012 and beyond…

By Dan O’Donnell

It is time to get my crystal ball out of the safe and see what is in store for us in 2012 and beyond. 2011 was a year steeped in gloom and doom with headlines about international defaults, political instability, hacktivism, cyber theft and unrelenting unemployment. I am here to tell you there is cause for an optimistic outlook for the future.

Here are some silver bullets for your new year:

• Network Security: Hacks and cyber thefts will continue. However, with advances in IPS, DLP, next generation firewalls and improved tap and aggregation architectures, networks can be better protected from attacks than ever before.
• Network Speeds: Look for rapid advancement in core network speeds. 1Gbps is quickly giving way to 10Gbps. The big networks are looking into 40Gbps and 100Gbps core links.
• Technology: Intel will introduce a new chip in the spring that has three billion transistors. That is “Billion” with “B” transistors on a single chip.
• Talking to Machines: You will be able to talk to your phone as much as you talk on your phone. Voice recognition interfaces for phones and other computing equipment is ready for prime time. It will soon expand beyond phones to coffee makers, TVs and video games. Less mouse, more mouth!
• Europe will figure it out: All parliamentary egos aside, the economic realities will prevail. The Euro zone is “too big to fail.” The strong will help the weak and new rules will lead to the beginning of a more stable and vibrant market in Europe.
• U. S. Oil Independence: This long sought after goal is becoming a reality. Over the next five years and beyond, new extraction technology in the Bakken Oil Fields will completely change the geopolitical relationship between the U. S. and the Middle East. Google “Bakken Oil Fields” for more information.
• Unemployment Improvement: I am an optimist here. As stubborn as the unemployment rate has been, 2012 is the year the fever will break. After all, 2012 is an election year. For more good employment news Google “North Dakota Employment.” Hint: 3.5% unemployment with 16,000 open positions.
• More Technology: Network Critical is shrinking size and cost of Next Generation Port Aggregators and Network Devices. Our new AFS solution for port aggregation, filtering and distribution has reached 48 ports of non-blocking 10Gbps access in 1U of rack space, using only 150 Watts AC of power. Now that is good news!

Network Critical is bullish on 2012. We will continue to provide the best products and uncompromised attention to our customers around the globe. We will work to make our towns and the world a better place in 2012 and beyond.

Finally, we wish all our partners and customers a prosperous and happy New Year!

Analyzing Performance through the Customer’s Glasses

By: Dan O’Donnell

I have worn glasses since I was ten. It started when I could not read the blackboard from my desk. I asked to be put in the first row. Then I would scoot my desk up closer to the blackboard a little at a time so no one would notice. Eventually, I was so close to the blackboard that everyone noticed and my teacher recommended to my parents that I see an eye doctor.

On the way home from the eye doctor, fitted with my new glasses, I was amazed at the world around me. The full moon was not really a fuzzy, white ball. There were edges and shadows that I never saw before. My view of the moon was skewed and I did not know it. I saw the fuzzy ball and I believed that was the moon. However, the moon was actually quite different than what I saw and believed.

Today, Communications Service Providers (CSP) typically use surveys from customer contacts with various departments such as Billing, Support, Service and Sales. These surveys are compared to Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and attempt to gauge customer satisfaction and retention likelihood. There are questions with this methodology including the accuracy of the survey data, the timeliness of the reporting and whether the data truly reflects the customer experience.

Accurate measurement and true understanding of the customer experience is the most critical component of CSP business management. Delighting customers with a positive experience every time is the key to customer retention, selling new services, increasing the customer base and growing revenue. Here comes the exciting news…a better way to see and understand the customer experience is being developed.

CSPs have a very rich source of customer experience data at their fingertips. It is their network. The problem, heretofore, has been accessing, capturing, retrieving, analyzing and presenting the massive amounts of data on the network. There are billions of calls set up and torn down every day. There are petabytes of data passing through the network every second. Surfacing KPIs from live data can provide a clear, timely and actionable picture of the customer experience.

Through a collaboration sponsored by the TM Forum and championed by Telecom Italia, Network Critical, Ventraq, IBM Netezza, and The Now Factory are developing a CEM solution that integrates data analytics to better understand and improve the customer experience. Phase I of the project was presented at Management World Americas in Orlando last week and received keen interest from the CSP community.

This ground breaking work allows massive amounts of data to be analyzed and crystallized into manageable, understandable indices for executive reporting and follow-up action. This is not just network performance and dropped calls. This system will also analyze protocols and applications that are beyond network control yet have a significant impact on the customer. It will also help CSPs understand how their network is being used. Are people downloading music, playing games, checking email, connecting with others over social media? This data goes beyond network level performance and provides critical information for network dimensioning and helping the CSP manage the user experience.

Advancing CEM using data analytics puts the focus on the customer first. It allows CSPs to see a new, clearer view of their customers that was not possible before. The fuzzy, white ball that was the customer is now a very sharp circle with shadows, hills and valleys. With the customer in clear focus, the opportunities to enhance the customer experience are endless.

The End of SSL Certificate Authorities

By: Michael Rash, Security Solutions Architect at Enterasys Networks.

The Blackhat Briefings consistently impacts the computer security landscape year after year, and 2011 is no different. One of the most important talks this year was Moxie Marlinspike’sSSL And The Future Of Authenticity. This talk blew the doors off of the entire Certificate Authority system that is place today for the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), and proposed a viable (and better I might add) alternative called Convergence. The basic idea behind Convergence is that certificate authorities have too much power in the SSL system in that they cannot easily be distrusted and continue to have the Internet function properly. That is, once a CA becomes rather large and is used by the major browsers to verify SSL certificates for a significant portion of the Internet, there is no mechanism in SSL to be able to remove the CA from the browsers if the CA becomes untrustworthy. A bad CA can just be deleted from the browser CA list, but then the browser would generate SSL certificate warnings for any site that uses a cert that is supposed to be validated by the CA. This, by itself, may not sound so bad, but the real problem is that without a way to validate site certificates, anyone could issue a “valid” cert for a site and the hapless user would have no way to know it isn’t real. SSL essentially forces users to trust CA’s indefinitely. So, if a CA does something that demonstrates to users that it is untrustworthy – such as getting hacked, behaving badly, or both as in Comodo’s case - there is no alternative but to continue “trusting” the CA.

This is where Convergence comes in. Under the Convergence model, SSL certificates are no longer required to be verified by a CA. So, how can a user be confident that SSL communications with a site are using the proper certificates? The answer is that Convergence uses a set of intermediate nodes called “Notaries” that exist on various locations around the Internet. For any SSL connection initiated by a user to an SSL-protected site, Convergence downloads the site certificate from all of the configured Notaries and a comparison is performed. If the certificate is identical across all Notaries, then the user can have a lot of confidence that a MITM attack is not underway. At least, the user can certainly have more confidence in this validation than the validation performed by any hacked certificate authority. And, even if a user trusts that a CA hasn’t been hacked, the user doesn’t really know for sure. (Can any entity prove that it isn’t hacked at any given time?) For any given CA, there is an excellent chance that it will be hacked at some point in the future too.

Convergence offers some nice additional features, such as anonymization of SSL connections made through the Notaries, and it is easy for users to change the list of trusted Notaries. Moxie refers to the later as “trust agility”, and is one of the key reasons that replacing the CA system with Convergence is not just a different architecture – it fundamentally means that the power is put in the hands of users instead of the CA’s. What happens if a Notary is hacked? No problem – the user can simply remove that one from the list (and maybe add a new one) and everything continues to work.

What are the downsides to Convergence? In the short term there will be some growing pains as Convergence is ported to all of the major browsers. The version of Firefox that I run on Ubuntu is not supported yet for example. Some people have concerns over performance because now instead of a single SSL connection there are multiple connections involved as a site certificate is validated by multiple Notaries. However, Moxie has implemented a robust caching mechanism that addresses this concern, and in some cases this makes SSL connections faster.

Incidentally, according to Moxie, Comodo currently signs over one quarter of the SSL-enabled sites on the Internet. So, in the current model, if a user deletes Comodo from the browser CA list then one quarter of Internet SSL sites break. Comodo is not the only instance of a certificate authority getting hacked either – just two months ago in mid-July, 2011, a Dutch CA called “DigiNotar” was hacked as well and has gone bankrupt as a result. Just imagine would would happen if Verisign – which had over 47% of the SSL verification market in 2009 and was acquired by Symantec – were to get hacked as well. Users need an alternative for SSL certificate verification, and Convergence looks like an excellent solution. The bottom line is that even if the current CA system remains in place, as a frequent user of SSL, I would still want a way to verify that an SSL certificate looks the same from multiple locations regardless of what a CA tells me. In this sense, there is a good case for Convergence whether or not it is broadly adopted.

On a final note, Moxie presented Convergence at both Blackhat and Defcon, and as a bonus he was asked to participate on a panel discussion at Defcon with the legendary Whitfield Diffie of Diffie-Hellman key exchange fame. During this panel, Moxie hinted that a current CA is looking at deploying Convergence. This is perhaps a validation that Convergence is a shot across the bow of certificate authorities in general, and that they should pay close attention.