Netscout – founded 30 years back in the US, is a Boston-based solution and service company. It was initiated by Indian immigrant students who went to Boston for higher education. It was initially offering IP network infrastructure, but later it realized the need for service assurance. Therefore, the founders created a product as a sniffer which is popularly known by the term ‘probe’.
Down 30 years, NETSCOUT is only focusing on its one-goal policy of packet forensics. The 7 packet analysis company has grown both organically and inorganically through focus and networking.
Rajneesh De, Consulting Editor, APAC News Network joined in conversation with Gaurav Mohan, VP-Sales, NETSCOUT to know the genesis of NETSCOUT and update on the solutions and services that are in the NETSCOUT portfolio.
Since the areas of service assurance and cyber security in one and a half years of work from home are now transformed into a heterogeneous system. How have NETSCOUT solutions helped enterprises manage their impact on service assurance as well as cyber security during the pandemic?
Pandemic impacted the enterprise management, due to work from home- a lot of heterogeneous devices were allowed to use which earlier were not advisable for ex-corporate networks. NETSCOUT became the central efficient and smooth functioning enterprise with service assurance solution alongside DDOS solution as devices connected to the network were not supposed to be connected and so we need to come up with strategies to protect the network otherwise those devices can become a potential threat to the network and bring down the network. The second aspect was the performance of the network became the key to the operations and functioning of any corporation. The tools of NETSCOUT helped the organizations to identify the problem and its root cause. The dashboard gave them a nice view of how the network and services are performing on the network and ensure that there is no traffic coming.
How does a service assurance tool ensure real assurance about the services?
It is important to understand not only the solution but how does one ensures that the quality of service is not compromised in a multi-cloud or a hybrid environment. The situation is very simple however it can be made complicated in a multi-cloud complex environment. Perhaps to keep it simple, the key is that when the employees accessing the applications must not sign up for more than one cloud provider. The key is to instrument at the edge so that the user gets the visibility and assurance that everything that is working in the environment is working as per what it is supposed to deliver and NETSCOUT provides layer 7 visibility so that the consumer knows exactly what the problem is.
What are the government projects which NETSCOUT is working on and what are those areas/environments of working?
Some highlights here are the smart city projects that the Government of India is running, each of the smart cities is key and central to the network infrastructure. And so we have to perform at an optimal level for all the services on the smart city framework to perform and provide a tool like ours to make sure that the network is performing well. It has to provide the same level of services to all the applications running on the infrastructure and to give them an ability just in case if the network has a problem then in just a few clicks, it will identify the root causes and point them to the right direction.
What sort of go-to-market strategy does NETSCOUT follow in terms of the partner network and client acquisition?
In NETSCOUT, people are covering large parts of the geography and also we rely heavily on our partner ecosystem so we have a robust two-tier partner ecosystem. In this planner we have distributors, we have partners working under the distributors and then we have partners who are working directly with the end customers. Hence, it’s a multi-tier architecture and our go-to market is both direct as well as the partner.
