It's hard to believe that just a year ago we were at the Cisco Live Europe show in Barcelona for our first European tradeshow event. We are excited to be going to London for this year's event to showcase the major advancements we have made in network performance management. Moreover, our EMEA team has grown considerably over the last year and our partner network has also expanded significantly. So much so that we are also hosting an EMEA Partner event the day before Cisco.

As an avid network management paleontologist, I've been watching the evolution of players and products in this space for many years and I thought it might be useful to provide some field spotting notes for fellow investigators.

Managing bandwidth needs and consumption is a discipline that has existed since the first 150bps modems connected computer systems together. Today, with multi-gigabit links becoming an everyday reality, we are still facing the same conundrums – only the number of zeros has changed.

Never before have network managers been faced with more dynamic and convoluted environments that they must strive to bring under control. End points are going mobile, as are servers with the advent of server virtualization and cloud. Convergence of voice and video onto traditional data networks demands ever-closer attention be paid to network efficiency to assure quality and network health. Under these circumstances, clear and distinct visibility into network performance has never been more important, and leveraging the power of NetFlow monitoring data is key. NetFlow – historically the most commonly available form of flow data – has undergone recent technology enhancements that enriched its ability to deliver the definitive service and application performance visibility network managers need.

Maintaining optimal network performance is critical in today’s business climate, with the convergence of all business applications and communications on the same network infrastructure, for both enterprises and service providers. Network managers are facing increasingly dynamic, convoluted, and multi-tenant environments, with end points going mobile, server and application infrastructure being virtualized and distributed, and the introduction of cloud-based applications. This demands that ever-closer attention be paid to network performance in order to cost effectively and proactively deliver and ensure service levels and application delivery.

SevOne has raced out of the blocks in 2011 with the addition of Confuto Sytems to our European partnership program. A full service consulting firm based in Norway, Confuto Systems will represent us throughout the Nordic region, integrating our SevOne Performance Appliance Solution with its FirstView portal, which offers a suite of best-of-breed IT management solutions. SevOne customers in the region will also benefit from local support.

Happy New Year!

We are back and armed with a new whiteboard video. If you haven't already watched one of our whiteboard videos starring our super smart CTO, Vess Bakalov, you are most certainly missing out on something great and you can find them all here.