NETSCOUT has received what amounts to a renewal of its Citrix Ready certification, but this is coincidentally timed with changes in how their Arbor Networks security division goes to market, which will have channel implications.
NETSCOUT Systems, the market leader in the service assurance business, has announced that their nGeniusONE Service Assurance Platform has been verified as Citrix Ready on Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops. By itself, that’s not an earth-shattering announcement. NETSCOUT has been certified as Citrix Ready previously, and this is simply a re-certification on a new Citrix offering. However, as NETSCOUT is in the process of restructuring their business to integrate their Arbor Networks security division into a common go-to-market, that will have the effect of opening all the products of each unit to the resellers of the others. This will have the effect of opening the Citrix opportunities to the Arbor channel.
NETSCOUT is the market leader in the service assurance space – application performance management and network performance management.
“Our install base is impressive,” said Russ Currie, NETSCOUT’s VP of Enterprise Strategies. “It’s about 400 million on the enterprise side, $400 million on the carrier side and $200 million that are on both sides. We still maintain our status of the 500 lb gorilla of the industry.”
Their sweet spot has been the enterprise, historically.
Russ Currie, NETSCOUT’s VP of Enterprise Strategies
“We are really the top of the Fortune 1000,” Currie stated. “On the carrier side, its all the Tier One carriers and a significant amount of Tier Two carriers now. But as we introduce Fluke capabilities, it brings us more into the midrange. In addition, while we were associated with big heavy hardware, we have gone to a software-first model and can deploy in the public and private cloud.”
In 2014 they acquired the communications business of Danaher Communications, consisting of Arbor Networks, Tektronix Communications, Arbor Networks, and certain parts of Fluke Networks. Arbor has been run as a separate division, but some major changes are happening which will change how NETSCOUT, Arbor, and their channel partners go to market.
“We have been running Arbor Networks as our security division, and the whole go-to-market was separated out, and the gear was branded differently,” Currie said. “We are really working now on integrating the two companies and having a more consistent and common approach to our solution set, so the customer realizes they are buying from a single vendor. That is playing out in our reseller strategy as well. While the two channels had been separate, each will now be able to sell all the kit. We are in process with that transition now.”
From a channel perspective, that’s significant.
“The traditional NETSCOURT business involved the channel primarily around the fulfillment side, with partners like WWT,” Currie indicated. “On the Arbor side, there has been a much more robust channel, and as we move forward, we will accelerate this.”
Enter the new Citrix validation of the NETSCOUT nGeniusONE Service Assurance Platform through the Citrix Ready program, which will be one of the avenues to open up additional channel opportunities for Arbor resellers.
“Citrix has gone through some reworking of their offerings,” Currie noted. “We have been certified as Citrix Ready for four years. This really amounts to a recert under their most current offering.”
The nGeniusONE platform provides end-to-end latency monitoring and visibility into Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop solutions on-prem, virtually, or in the cloud. This reduces the time it takes to find and fix performance issues.
“For Citrix users, we give them a quicker mean time to repair,” Currie said. “We also play a key role in making sure that companies are working on the right problem. They often think they are having a problem with Citrix, and we are able to identify if the problem really lies somewhere else, which avoids finger-pointing at Citrix. For instance, a customer with developers in India said they were taking nine minutes to load a virtual desktop. They thought it was a Citrix problem. Our gear got closer to the point of entry to the stack, and found that the real issue was an Active Directory storm with the delay created by a tertiary server. We provide a big holistic visibility that let them see it from a services perspective.”
Currie said that NETSCOUT’s technology also provides deeper understanding of particular Citrix configurations.
“VDI is interesting in the that you set up queues and channeling,” he said. “A print queue might have a QOS of 1 – which u don’t need – and which in turn negatively impacts video. These are the sort of things we can see on the wire, to help these guys tune their systems.”
