IT Week: As chief executive of application traffic management specialist Packeteer, can you explain how application traffic management is changing?

Dave Côté: Today, we're having to put different traffic types on the same physical network, whereas in the old days System Network Architecture [SNA], IP and other types of traffic would go over different networks. So we're having to prioritise certain traffic types, which traffic management can definitely help with. With Multiprotocol Label Switching [MPLS] becoming the main public network protocol, and sold on the basis of end-users getting better service-level agreements, we can help since we can monitor MPLS tags and track whether you're getting what you paid for.

Is there much overlap between software for application traffic management and software for network packet analysis?

Network packet analysis is a subset of application traffic management and should be considered a diagnostic tool used within application traffic management solutions. Packet analysis by itself helps to identify a problem, but it's limited unless it's part of a larger solution. Many vendors of application management tools fail to provide complete visibility into all the applications that exist on a network - claiming that providing classification by application signature into the five, 10 or 20 applications they happen to support is enough. Because so many business applications have multiple flows that can sometimes be hidden - for example voice over IP [VoIP] consists of at least four - unless the management tool provides complete visibility, it may be necessary to invest in separate packet analysis software.

Can application management tools help to improve firms' security?

At its core, application traffic management is a guarantor of performance, so protecting your critical business applications is part of the performance problem. Part of our new software release is called Adaptive Response and this can be used to detect malicious traffic, email the user about what's happening, run a packet capture, gather some diagnostic info to detect where it's coming from. We can then enable a specific policy on that traffic to, for example, limit it, until we decide what best needs to be done.

What challenges do you see ahead for traffic management?

If in five years from now we are still trying to resolve traffic management difficulties in the same way we are doing today, the increasingly complex and dynamic nature of networks will overwhelm traffic management solutions. The problem will not solve itself, and it will only get worse. The challenge of traffic management going forward is to create a scalable, manageable, and adaptive solution that does not overwhelm the IT manager with information and decisions in the fast-evolving world of applications on a business network.

ABOUT DAVE COTE

Dave Côté has served as president, chief executive and director of Packeteer since October 2002.

From April 1997 to October 2002, Cote was a vice president of worldwide marketing and communication at semiconductor company Integrated Device Technology.