Datacom Systems (News - Alert), which sells Test Access Points, data aggregation tools and other network access products, has named Kevin Formby their new president and CEO.

Formby comes to Datacom from Endace, where he served as vice president of Business Development. Endace sells data capture and analysis hardware and software.

Company officials say Datacom’s outgoing president and CEO, Sam Lanzaframe, will serve as chairman.

Accepting the job, Formby noted Datacom Systems’ “great pedigree in the development and marketing of network taps and matrix switches,” saying he sees an opportunity for the company in the “increasing need for IT management to monitor critical infrastructure. The market for such tools is therefore expanding rapidly and Datacom Systems is well placed to capture a significant portion of this market.”

Formby specifically mentioned Datacom’s ongoing matrix switch work for colo hosting and shared infrastructure providers, crediting the company’s “deep knowledge and capabilities in this marketplace,” and setting out as an objective the growing of Datacom’s market share in this segment.

Recently TMC’s (News - Alert) Susan J. Campbell noted that while companies today rely on their networks and supported applications, “when something goes wrong within an application, it can halt business activities and leave the user struggling to make standard processes work as expected.”

This is an area Datacom has focused on. The company produced a white paper explaining that such situations demand application performance monitoring “to take a proactive approach to applications to ensure their optimal performance before the user experiences an interruption or failure,” Campbell noted, adding that “the de facto standard for data access in networks today is deploying network taps, link aggregators and data access switches to access network tools.”

That’s certainly a market segment Datacom will prioritize in upcoming weeks and months as well.