Network Instruments® 47 Percent Growth Outpaces Industry

Comprehensive analysis offerings drive thirteenth consecutive year of double-digit growth

January 23, 2008 – Minneapolis, MN — Network Instruments, a leading provider of innovative analysis solutions for in-depth network intelligence and continuous availability, today announced that total company revenue for 2007 increased by 47 percent over 2006. This marks the thirteenth consecutive year of double-digit growth. The surge in company sales was driven by significant competitive displacements, increased demand for new retrospective analysis, top-to-bottom reporting, and infrastructure management solutions, as well as an expanding NetQoS partnership.

Network Instruments’ expansion and integrated product offerings place it in a unique position in the analysis space. Steve Steinke, research director of networks for The 451 Group, noted in a recent report: “While Network Instruments has undergone steady growth since its inception, it appears to be facing significant opportunities as its competitors get acquired or distracted.”

Significant Competitive Wins
Many Fortune 1000 companies switched to Network Instruments because of its comprehensive analysis product line. Corporations have widely adopted GigaStor™ and Observer® saving substantial time in troubleshooting by eliminating the step of problem replication. GigaStor saves all packets traversing the network, allowing firms to drill down to the nanosecond and analyze any transaction. Observer’s Expert Analysis and forensic capabilities quickly resolve network, application, and security issues.

"Network Instruments simply has a better value proposition," said John Rittner, Chicago Board Options Exchange network manager. "The ability to capture and store huge amounts of network data and be able to run it against Expert analytics for faster problem resolution, all at a better price point, is an easy choice. By deploying the GigaStor at strategic places in the network we have the ability to go back in time and look at traffic of interest and filter it down to the particular time frame and then do our analysis."

Major customer wins from 2007 included: NYSE Euronext, NASDAQ, Medtronic, Cable and Wireless, Vodafone, 3M, Northwest Airlines, Southwest Securities, Charles Schwab, Chicago Board Options Exchange, Pictet and Cie, IKB Deutsche Industriebank AG, USAA, Telecom Italia, Moneysupermarket.com, NEC Unified Solutions, Highbridge Capital Management, and Citizens Bank.

“Network Instruments continues to be at the forefront of network analysis both in terms of growth and product development,” said Douglas Smith, president and co-founder of Network Instruments. “Our 47 percent growth rate was unique among our competitors who grew at a fraction of that rate, if at all. Through our continued product development firsts, leadership in the retrospective analysis market, and partnerships, we’re ensuring that we remain at the forefront of the analysis space. In our fourteenth year of business we continue to offer a stable and fully integrated product line our customers can rely on to quickly isolate network, application, security, or system problems. No other analysis vendor can say that.”

Integrated Analysis and Troubleshooting
Often IT teams within an organization spend significant time determining whether performance problems are caused by network, application, infrastructure, or security issues. In this type of enterprise environment, seconds of downtime can quickly multiply into hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars lost. Large organizations are looking for solutions that reduce their mean time to repair and ensure smooth application delivery.

Network Instruments answered customer demands in 2007 by expanding and integrating its analysis solutions to serve as a comprehensive troubleshooting platform between IT teams to immediately diagnose the root cause of any network, application, or security issue. In 2007, Network Instruments introduced the following enhancements and appliances:

• Observer Reporting Server – Observer Reporting Server provides an enterprise-wide view of network performance and health. Network professionals use the Observer Reporting Server to quickly identify performance problems, create and share reports on enterprise-wide network performance, and perform root cause analysis.
  
  
• Observer Reporting Server – GigaStor Integration – The integration combines high-level reporting with in-depth forensics in one seamless solution. This allows the engineer, upon discovering a problem presented by the ORS, to drill into GigaStor to review and analyze network traffic transmitted before, during, and after the problem occurred.
  
  
• GigaStor Security Forensics – Security Forensics expands the analysis capabilities of GigaStor to investigate security breaches and provides a common analysis platform that can be used by security and network analysis teams. Security Forensics identifies the source of security violations in context of network and application issues, reducing IT teams’ infighting by providing clear evidence to the problem’s cause.
  
  
• GigaStor Portable – The first mobile network forensics solution with storage allows engineers to capture and investigate problems in the field. GigaStor Portable provides network professionals with the first retrospective analysis solution for remote troubleshooting.
  
  
• GigaStor Expandable – The release of GigaStor Expandable means that organizations using GigaStor can increase their storage capacity to up to 48 TB, the largest in the industry.
  
  
• Link Analyst 5 – The latest version of Link Analyst manages network infrastructure availability and performance by identifying network devices, and continually polling and monitoring their status. Link Analyst integrates with Observer to investigate application and overall network performance supported by the infrastructure. It also works seamlessly with GigaStor to investigate at a granular level a specific device’s performance history.

Comprehensive NetQoS-Network Instruments Solution
In September 2007, Network Instruments and NetQoS released the first solution to couple high-level, enterprise-wide performance reporting with in-depth packet capture and retrospective analysis.

The Network Instruments GigaStor collects and stores all packets traversing the network for historical analysis. NetQoS SuperAgent isolates response time issues to the application, server, or network and automatically launches diagnostic investigations into problems. The NetQoS Connector for GigaStor allows SuperAgent to expand its investigations by directly tapping the relevant historical packet-level information on the GigaStor.

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About Network Instruments
Network Instruments provides in-depth network intelligence and continuous network availability through innovative analysis solutions. Enterprise network professionals depend on Network Instruments’ Observer product line for unparalleled network visibility to efficiently solve network problems and manage deployments. By combining a powerful management console with high-performance analysis appliances, Observer simplifies problem resolution and optimizes network and application performance. The company continues to lead the industry in ROI with its advanced Distributed Network Analysis (NI-DNA™) architecture, which successfully integrates comprehensive analysis functionality across heterogeneous networks through a single monitoring interface. Network Instruments is headquartered in Minneapolis with sales offices worldwide and distributors in over 50 countries. For more information about the company, products, technology, NI-DNA, becoming a partner, and NI University please visit www.networkinstruments.com or the company’s blog www.networkinstruments.com/blog.

Editor’s Note: The 451 Group’s report, “Network Instruments challenges a new class of competitors with Link Analyst 5” referenced from Steve Steinke above, is an independently-produced report that was neither sponsored nor otherwise directly funded by Network Instruments. The report and its entire contents are the sole property of The 451 Group, copyright 2008, and is reproduced here by permission. The entire content of the report is available at www.the451group.com.

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