It was at the turn of the millennium. I was one of the first engineers entrusted with the job of installing Network Computers, the thin client that Oracle had just introduced as an alternative to personal computers. During the process, as I described the benefits of network computing and three-tier architecture to customers, there was a palpable skepticism all around. Twenty years have passed since. Client-server gave way to three-tier architecture, and with the internet came cloud computing. The hegemony of few large monolithic applications ended, giving way to an ecosystem of loosely distributed applications, running across on-prem and those clouds. Our dependency on network was never as viscerally felt, before the pandemic forced us out of our offices and applications out of data centers. Even a doctor-patient interaction is now at the mercy of the internet, with a telemedicine provider reporting a 6x increase in network connections during the pandemic. 5G and Edge Computing are accelerating the phenomenon.
What has lagged behind throughout this transformation though, is monitoring. While the monitoring of business services has been preached by every single monitoring vendor for more than ten years, the network continues to be the most neglected component in practice. Network availability is almost taken for granted, but the reality according to an Uptime Institute survey shows that close to 30% of the outages are related to the network, by far the highest among all outages. As evidenced recently, an apparently innocuous routing configuration can bring social media to a standstill. The number is even higher if one takes network brownouts into consideration.
This is where AppNeta excels. It can detect network outages and performance degradation between office sites, data center and cloud, and between the home and office. It can sit between the access points and SaaS applications to provide seamless digital experience to the users. It complements Broadcom’s rich network operations monitoring portfolio which serves enterprise customers across various vertical segments. Now the network operators in those enterprises can also respond to issues that they were previously blind spots. AppNeta can also help the enterprises ensure accountability of their communication service providers and negotiate SLAs with them. For the ones among them with more mature operations, monitoring can be integrated with automation to fail over to redundant links. And last but not least, these sites can now be modeled into business services that can be presented to CIOs via Broadcom’s AIOps solution.
Acquisitions are exciting. But, with that excitement come challenges and new goals. Our goal now is to provide Broadcom customers a seamless “borderless monitoring” experience, and mitigate the effect of network outages in their critical business services.