Just before a recent meeting I had with Fluke Networks, the firm that produces those neat network troubleshooting handheld devices, I heard that NetScout had announced an agreement to buy Network General for $205m.

In the brave new world of enterprise performance management (EPM), this is a significant announcement. When I broke the news to Fluke Networks field marketing manager Benny Vogels the look on his face was a picture. You could almost see the cogs and gears winding furiously as he tried to figure out what exactly this would mean for Fluke Networks. Through its acquisition of Visual Networks in 2006 and Crannog Software earlier this year, Fluke Networks is now in direct competition with the nascent NetScout/Network General combo.

Things have not been going too well for Network General of late. The company has struggled to integrate business service monitoring technology it gained from its 2006 acquisition of Fidelia Systems into its Sniffer network packet analysis system.
Network General’s woes are reflected in the fact that NetScout’s bid of $205m is way short of the $1.1bn McAfee spent buying the vendor back in 1997.

Packet analysis software has undergone quite a change recently. Vendors rebranded their wares as EPM systems mainly in response to the growth in real-time business-critical applications, such as voice over IP, videoconferencing and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, running over enterprise networks. Monitoring and troubleshooting has had to get faster to minimise the chances of these types of systems going down.

EPM systems can provide application performance statistics in real time as well as retrospectively. The ability of these tools to provide graphical representations of network problems should boost uptake of enterprise IP telephony systems. When the helpdesk gets a call that the chief executive’s phone is on the blink, having a system that has already flagged the cause of the problem and its cure is bound to have the manager responsible for voice systems dancing in the aisles.

However, although a lot of UK firms have fiddled at the edges of IP telephony, only about one in 10 has rolled out the technology. That said, demand for EPM systems looks set for rapid growth. That’s certainly what NetScout and Network General are pinning their future on. The question is, though, will they be able to integrate their packages quickly enough to take advantage of the impetus that mergers can sometimes give? And will any combined offering be able to exceed the functionality of what’s already out there?