Network General to Acquire Fidelia

Network General has announced a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Fidelia, Inc. of Princeton, N.J. With this acquisition, the packet flow-based application and network performance management provider will expand its product portfolio to cover the entire realm of enterprise application performance management. Network General intends to offer the only solution on the market that delivers an end-to-end, correlated view of performance and availability of critical business services, and the underlying network and server infrastructure the applications run on.

"Network General's acquisition of Fidelia is an inspired move for a number of reasons," said Dennis Drogseth, vice president, Enterprise Management Associates. "The most obvious is that selling NetVigil's rich functionality into Network General's broad Sniffer base with its strong sales and market presence should bring Network General strong immediate gains. But longer term, the complementarity of the two solution sets holds out the potential for a truly unique offering that combines leading capabilities in flow-based management and packet analysis, with root cause and topology across multiple domains, as well as business service modeling. Given this mix, Network General has the opportunity to reset some assumptions about traditional market categories in favor of new, more versatile and integrated offerings."

Fidelia's flagship product, NetVigil, is a comprehensive business service monitoring application. It combines fault and performance monitoring capabilities, allowing IT managers to integrate their businesses with the IT infrastructure on which they depend. With NetVigil, business unit managers can create "business container" views of the servers, networks or applications that are critical to their businesses, allowing them to easily see if a business service is performing as expected. At the same time, IT managers or database administrators can create the exact views they need to track the performance of the particular devices, applications, servers or databases they monitor and maintain.

"Today's complex IT environments support a broad range of multi-tiered, converged media applications across distributed enterprises," said Ken Boyd, CIO and EVP, Products, Network General. "Optimal performance of these applications requires visibility across all IT infrastructure components under a single umbrella. This approach ensures performance issues are isolated and resolved quickly, eliminating the finger pointing that commonly occurs in siloed IT organizations. It also helps IT fulfill its internal SLAs and closely aligns IT with business objectives."

"This combination opens up new opportunities for Fidelia's customers to partner with a larger industry leader that can serve their broad IT needs. In addition to integrating NetVigil with the Sniffer product family, we will continue to enhance the NetVigil product line to protect and enrich our customer investments," said Vikas Aggarwal, CEO Fidelia. "These goals are consistent with our mission to help our customers proactively manage application and network performance with solutions that set new industry benchmarks."

"Network General is executing its aggressive growth and market expansion strategy. Fidelia's NetVigil product line has experienced significant market traction and has doubled its customer base every year. NetVigil complements Network General's traditional Sniffer strengths. With 19 years experience, more than 13,000 customers, strong brand recognition and global distribution, Network General is uniquely positioned to provide comprehensive 'packet to dashboard' visibility, not only up and down the network stack, but also across all IT infrastructure components that deliver critical business services," said Ken Boyd, CIO and EVP of Products, Network General.

Founded in 2000 by Vikas Aggarwal and a team from Verio, Fidelia Technology, Inc. was a privately held software company based in Princeton, New Jersey. Fidelia was jointly funded by Windspeed Ventures (Lexington, MA) and JT Venture Partners (Boston, MA). Fidelia brings about 70 customers, including Sony Online Entertainment, Spirit Airlines and Yale University, who have been using the product for more than four years.