Network Diagramming Channel Feature

Network Diagramming Solutions Provider OPNET Reflects on 2011

By Carrie Schmelkin
TMCnet Web Editor

For over two decades, OPNET Technologies (News - Alert) – a provider of network diagramming solutions –has made its dent in the market, bringing solutions that automatically produce accurate, enterprise-grade, engineering-quality network diagrams, to the market. As OPNET gets closer to rounding out its 25th anniversary, it took the time to sit down with TMCnet and reflect on another year in the industry.

“2011 has been an outstanding year for OPNET,” Susan Cole, OPNET Media Relations, told TMCnet. “Significant new offerings were introduced, including AppMapper – the industry’s first fully automated solution for run-time application dependency mapping. OPNET also launched its first SaaS (News - Alert)-based offering in 2011.”

“New capabilities were announced that extend and enhance OPNET’s application performance management for cloud and mobile environments,” she added.

One of the main highlights was enhancing its automated network diagramming solution NetMapper by adding support for end systems, physical device chassis visualization, and greater integration with other products in OPNET’s solution portfolio.

The solution not only produces diagrams in the popular Microsoft (News - Alert) Visio format, including Layer 2/3, Spanning Tree, OSPF, EIGRP, MPLS, VLANs, BGP, and more, but it distinguishes itself in other ways as well, by including troubleshooting information in diagrams, embedding network change information as part of diagrams, and more.

In addition to improving its networking diagramming offering, OPNET was able to delight in a strong fiscal year as well.

“In a year of economic turmoil and uncertainty, OPNET was pleased to report strong financial performance, with record revenue and earnings,” Cole said. “OPNET’s market capitalization is up nearly by half since this time last year.”

“The company has also expanded its customer base, continuing to make inroads in the APM (News - Alert) and network management markets, and in many cases taking share away from competitors,” she added.

As we ready to ring in the New Year, OPNET took the time to make some predictions as to what will happen in the network management field in 2012. One of the main things that Cole believes will get more attention is the process of automation.

“Organizations are getting squeezed – the environments they are managing are becoming more dynamic and complex, and staffs are not growing commensurately,” she said. “Automation is critical, to make the IT knowledge worker more productive without compromising operational integrity or quality of support.”

“That is why a solution like NetMapper resonates so strongly with network engineering and operations teams,” she added. “It automatically presents a wealth of information about the production network in a way that makes it immediately accessible and useful.”

Moreover, in addition to representing “what is connected to what,” NetMapper interprets data to present more “meaningful insight” into the network condition and behavior, such as the spanning tree configuration.

“OPNET’s network management solutions leverage a shared detailed behavioral model of the production network to enable a broad scope of workflows, including configuration management and network planning in addition to network diagramming.” Cole said. “In 2012 OPNET will continue to will continue to expand the scope of capabilities, as well as the numerous integration points among them.”