Company: ExtraHop Networks, Seattle, WA
Entry Submitted By: March Communications
Company Description: ExtraHop Networks is a leading provider of network-based application performance management (APM) solutions. The ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system performs the fastest and deepest analysis in the industry, achieving real-time transaction monitoring at speeds up to a sustained 10Gbps in a single appliance and application-level visibility with no agents, configuration, or overhead.
Nomination Category: Products & Product Management Categories
Nomination Sub Category: New Product or Service of the Year - Hardware - Networking

Nomination Title: ExtraHop Application Inspection Triggers (AIT)

Tell the story about this nominated product or service (up to 500 words). Describe its function, features, benefits, and performance to date.

Legacy application performance management (APM) products lack the speed and flexibility to keep up with today’s dynamic businesses. Many organizations have tried to keep pace by deploying a myriad of point solutions, resulting in monitoring infrastructures more complicated than the application environments they monitor.

This problem is common for organizations with customized applications, which are some of the biggest causes of increasing IT management costs and complexity.

According to EMA analyst Jim Frey, up to 75 percent of an organization’s business-critical applications are customized, and the cost of downtime due to custom-application outages has been estimated at more than $10,000 per hour.

Moreover, such applications usually are developed to rapidly fulfill an acute business need, making in-depth visibility and management of these applications even more critical to the bottom line.

To achieve this visibility with legacy agent-based monitoring approaches, another piece of software must be customized and installed on every device within the network to monitor and report on a specific application’s health. In typical IT environments with hundreds or thousands of devices, this approach is untenable, as any change or addition to the application portfolio requires subsequent manual customization and reinstallation of agents on each individual device. These agents require significant resources themselves to run and therefore can degrade the performance of the very applications they are meant to support.

To solve these problems, ExtraHop developed its game-changing 2011 innovation, Application Inspection Triggers (AIT). Based on ExtraHop’s award-winning, agentless, network-based APM solution, the first-of-its-kind AIT technology enables previously unattainable levels of metrics customization. AIT technology empowers IT personnel to customize performance monitoring of business-critical applications without the overhead and deployment headaches of agents or the need to request product enhancements from vendors.

The Application Inspection Triggers technology was awarded 2011 Innovation of the Year by Seattle Business Magazine, which wrote: “This scriptable event-processing system allows IT managers to use the full power of network monitoring at the application-protocol level, even for the most heavily customized systems. If ExtraHop makes the map of your network, then Triggers can help find where to go—and how to get there smoothly.”

Hyoun Park, research analyst at Aberdeen Group, praised AIT: “I'm looking forward to seeing how customized uses of the Inspection Triggers start becoming more common, as I can see how this approach could lead to specific types of monitoring (and ongoing network optimization) based on different application demands and end user needs. In the future, I can even see this being a key part of requesting network resources on demand as companies seek to reduce the time from identifying network and application performance needs and either making new configuration changes or acquiring new assets and services.”

Jeffrey Hill of TRAC Research also commended AIT’s innovation: “One of the key value propositions of business intelligence—the ability to deliver the right information to the right people at the right time—is becoming a key differentiator for APM vendors, and ExtraHop's recent announcement is a significant step in that direction.”

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Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the leader(s) of the team that developed this nominated product or service:

Jesse Rothstein is the CEO and co-founder of ExtraHop Networks, where his technical vision and expertise in enterprise networking provide ExtraHop with a competitive edge in the industry. With a world-class team behind him, Jesse is responsible for the technical architecture of the ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance platform, including the development of Application Inspection Triggers, as well as the vision for growing the business. Jesse has spoken about the evolution of network-based application performance management (APM) technologies at leading conferences and events, including Interop and previous AFCOM Data Center World conferences.