Xangati

Founded: June 2006

Headquarters: Cupertino, California

What it offers: An appliance named Falcon that performs what the company calls rapid problem identification (RPI). The goal of RPI is not only to determine the cause of performance problems, but also to let IT be the first to know that a problem is occurring. The appliance taps into flow information from protocols such as Cisco's NetFlow, sFlow or cFlow, plus packets from other relevant applications. The technology discovers all IP endpoints and the applications running on them. This enables it to profile the endpoint, be it a desktop, server, storage device, VoIP phone or PDA. The RPI technology finds a baseline of normal behavior and can then alert staff when anomalous events occur.

Why we like it: The appliance is simple to deploy -- it merely plugs into an available network port and is seen by the infrastructure as just another endpoint. It needs no probes or agents and the discovery process is automatic. "Xangati helps us stop the finger pointing between the network and server team about where issues are happening," says Michael Gruen, IT project manager for Bernalillo County in Albuquerque, N.M., in our September profile of the company. "It performs endpoint performance analysis without having anything installed on the client and has an appealing price point. As a government agency, less work to deploy and lower price are two big selling points and two less headaches."

Xangati also is targeting VoIP performance management, an application that can't afford to suffer slow performance. Plus its customers are finding creative uses for it. Kerman Telephone uses the device to find, in real time, spammers who are usurping bandwidth.

How the company got its start: Founders Alan Robin and Jagan Jagannathan felt that little progress had been made over the past decade in helping network operations' teams solve problems on the network, so set to work in building a product that did a one-up on traditional monitoring.

Management: Robin was previously president and CEO of netVmg. Co-founder and CTO Jagannanthan has held executive positions at Reactive Network Solutions, Xerox PARC and Sun. Founder and chairman Rangaswamy Vasudevan was previously CTO for CacheFlow (now Blue Coat Systems) through its IPO.

Funding: US$18 million from Walden International and Alloy Ventures.

Who uses the product: Bernalillo County and Kerman Telephone

Interesting fact: Prior to his gig in the corporate world (as a distinguished engineer with Sun, co-founder Vasudevan was a professor of computer science at the University of Calgary.