Network Diagramming Channel Feature

Hooper: Gigamon's Visibility Extends Life of Other Network Tools

By Paula Bernier
Executive Editor, TMC

Intelligent traffic visibility technology like that offered by Gigamon (News - Alert) can enable companies to extend the life of their tools related to analytics, forensics, management, monitoring, and recording. That’s the word from Paul Hooper, Gigamon’s vice president of marketing, who spoke with TMCnet earlier this week at Cisco (News - Alert) Live in San Diego.

Gigamon’s intelligent traffic visibility solutions are marketed under the name GigaVUE and come in the form factor of appliances. These appliances can be installed between the network and tools like those offered by Opnet, for example, to give users an end-to-end view of what’s happening.

“There’s a new approach to architecting networks to provide visibility,” said Hooper.

Actually, it’s not all that new, if you consider that more than 50 percent of the Fortune 50,

200 of the Fortune 1000, and four of the largest U.S. banks use Gigamon gear. For example, Oppenheimer Funds uses Gigamon gear because it moved from closed banking to online banking, and it wanted to do application performance management to ensure customer transactions don’t get delayed in the network.

Gigamon has recently introduced a new, smaller form factor chassis, a high density solution (320gig per slot now), a traffic aggregator, time stamping (so as traffic comes into the fabric it’s stamped), and a virtual machine implementation.

Hooper adds that Gigamon also has been bulking up its management team, although top management has been there since the company’s inception. For example, Paul Shinn recently joined the company as general counsel. He joins Gigamon from Hewlett-Packard (News - Alert).

“Gigamon is committed to building a strong and experienced leadership team that can take the company forward into a new era,” commented Gigamon CEO Ted Ho (News - Alert) in announcing the addition in May. “We are extremely pleased to have Paul join our company. He brings a wealth of experience and a solid understanding of corporate, intellectual property and legal issues affecting the technology industry, and will be a valuable addition to our executive team.”

Also in May, Gigamon announced the appointment of Andrew Miller, Polycom’s (News - Alert) president and chief executive officer, to its board of directors.