SEATTLE, Dec. 8 -- Modern applications and networks are becoming increasingly difficult to manage -- applications are moving to hyper-distributed service-oriented architectures, infrastructures are becoming virtualized and moving to the cloud, and the lines are blurring between the network and application tiers. At the same time, traditional application- and network-management tools have remained virtually unchanged for the last decade or more and simply fall short when it comes to providing much needed visibility for troubleshooting, performance tuning, and capacity planning. To meet the demands of today's complex applications, a new company called ExtraHop Networks (http://www.extrahop.com/) is launching its revolutionary Application Delivery Assurance Appliance to move today's IT organizations beyond monitoring and toward holistic application assurance.

"We see the same pressing need in companies large and small: How do I pinpoint the root cause in a sea of monitoring data? How do I tune these complex infrastructure components to optimize for my application mix? How do I achieve this visibility without a host of agents, configuration settings, and an army of additional staff?" said Jesse Rothstein, CEO and co-founder of ExtraHop. "After spending a lot of money and deploying numerous monitoring tools, tracking down performance problems still can feel like looking for a snowflake in an avalanche. The market is demanding a better solution."

Founders Jesse Rothstein and Raja Mukerji, who were the chief architects behind F5 Networks' BIG-IP version 9 product, saw a unique opportunity: the network is the definitive source of information when it comes to application performance -- how might one tap into this fire-hose of data and extract the relevant pieces? Incumbent tools approach the application from a bottoms-up infrastructure perspective, delivering a fractured view of a specific tier (such as the database). The ExtraHop founders envisioned a solution that delivers an integrated view of the entire application environment -- a completely passive network appliance that provides application-level visibility by closely examining tens of thousands of network transactions simultaneously, all in real-time.

Through a deep understanding of the networking protocols each application speaks, the ExtraHop appliance reconstructs the transaction streams to provide top-to-bottom visibility for the entire application stack. With multiple patents pending across key areas of the product architecture, ExtraHop brings an innovative solution that promises to help network operations and application support teams to achieve all the needed visibility to solve some of their toughest problems.

"The ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system was born out of dozens of conversations with customers and prospects," said Mukerji, president and co-founder of ExtraHop Networks. "IT organizations are increasingly frustrated because the current tools have failed to keep pace with advancements in the technology landscape. These customer pain points formed the basic requirements for our product, an easy-to-deploy solution that goes much deeper to provide full L2-L7 visibility. The ExtraHop solution brings unprecedented visibility and performance to network and application management, enabling network engineering and application teams to work together to ensure the performance of their most mission-critical applications."

This product launch comes on the heels of the announcement of new technology partnerships with F5 Networks and Gigamon. "The network is the lifeblood of today's businesses," said Tom Gallatin, vice president of marketing and sales at Gigamon. "A comprehensive network- and application-visibility solution, enabled by GigaVUE and the ExtraHop system, helps networking and application teams work together to troubleshoot problems, tune for performance, and ensure that the business is racing ahead."

In addition, ExtraHop adds a number of industry veterans to its advisory board including the CEO of National Instruments, James Truchard, and the vice president of product management and product marketing at F5 Networks, Erik Giesa. "ExtraHop helps both network and application teams navigate and pinpoint their most difficult performance issues by harnessing the wealth of data that flows through the network in a simple non-intrusive manner with incredible scale," said Giesa. "At its core is a complete application-fluent engine with intuitive diagnostics that turn data into something meaningful and actionable. Their innovative solution helps to open up the network 'black box' and provide valuable performance metrics and rapid diagnostics for the entire IT organization as well as enables optimized tuning of their network and application infrastructures. The operational savings this technology enables are tremendous."

About ExtraHop Networks

ExtraHop Networks was founded in early 2007 by Jesse Rothstein and Raja Mukerji, engineering veterans from F5 Networks and architects of the BIG-IP v9 product. The company's pioneering Application Delivery Assurance system is the industry's first completely passive network appliance that provides application-level visibility with zero agents, configuration, or overhead. The privately held company is headquartered in Seattle, and funded by Madrona Venture Group and other private investors.