This year has been a very busy one for Maine-based Plixer. It makes complete sense why the company is continuing to draw in customers as networks are only increasing in complexity as of late with the constant introduction of new devices into the enterprise infrastructure. Hence, tools such as flexible NetFlow are now about as important to any business as a steady revenue stream and satisfied customers are. 

2012 kicked off with a bang when Plixer revealed its Scrutinizer software had won the coveted 2011 INTERNET TELEPHONY Product of the Year Award in addition to the Communications Solutions Product of the Year Award. The Web-based tool boasts a user friendly interface and the ability to be seamlessly integrated into any legacy system. "If an organization thinks their network was compromised in any way, Scrutinizer can show IT the exact flow for each data log, and even the exact user in order to stop the bleeding," according to Michael Patterson (News - Alert), CEO and co-founder of Plixer.

Shortly thereafter, the revamped version of the network analyzer offering was unveiled, Scrunitizer 9.0. Some of its capabilities include: collecting over 100K flows per second (over 60M flows/minute); powering innovative Cisco Medianet reports that include in-depth network traffic visibility including Smart Logging and Telemetry (SLT), Cisco TrustSec (CTS (News - Alert)), performance routing (PfR) and performance monitoring reports (Medianet); vital interfaces with the most Jitter or latency; advanced Citrix NetScaler reports detailing URLs, applications and latency; SonicWALL (News - Alert) VPN reports pinpointing VPN names as well as remote and local addresses; and CrossCheck to provide deeper integration with third-party tools including What’s Up Gold, Orion, SNMPc, Uptime Devices, Nimsoft, etc. This was quickly followed a few months later with the unveiling of Scrutinizer 9.5.2, which brings security to a new level by preventing URL manipulation as well as driving usability. And just recently, Scrutiinzer 10 made it way to the market.

As the year progressed, the NetFlow provider made headlines once again when it launched support for Cisco (News - Alert) Performance Routing (PfR). Patterson commented at the time that "its unique exports required our Flexible NetFlow collector to take a new approach to reporting on the data in their templates. Organizations looking to gain insight on the collective performance of WAN links will appreciate the new templates related to MOS, latency, jitter and packet loss."

Besides hosting a variety of informative webinars in collaboration with Cisco that discussed topics ranging from the importance of NetFlow technology to key metrics of the solution, the series also highlighted significant benefits of NetFlow and IPFIX solutions, reporting capabilities when mixing FNF technologies, how performance routing can optimize connection times and priority traffic and how to gain hop by hop visibility of a flow as it traverses the network. Further, the company also hosted a traffic monitoring and threat detection webcast just last month that offered invaluable insight and things to be aware of when leveraging flow exports to drive application performance monitoring.

The Maine-based traffic analyzer firm also published the book, “Unleashing the Power of NetFlow and IPFIX.” It offers users approximately 150 color illustrations, and talks about in detail the varied types of flow technologies such as NetFlow, sFlow and IPFIX.

Oh, and did I mention the NetFlow provider made another extremely fun yet educational rap video? Yes, you read that correctly. In fact, as an alternative way to prove the importance of flow-based technologies in any business, Plixer created “Cisco Medianet: Application Performance Monitoring with NetFlow.

Patterson added, “In the technology industry, there are tremendous amounts of webinars and white papers detailing product features and technical specifications; after a while, they seem to become white noise. We are trying something different.”

As you can see, this year has proven to be extremely significant to the NetFlow provider as it has been able to continuously expand its footprint, helping firms to remain protected from various types of cyber attacks as they become more sophisticated.

To watch the full video, click here.

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