Extrahop's systems for looking wired network traffic in fine detail are in demand; expanding into security and other aspects of monitoring. With big plans for expansion across Europe this year, Extrahop's senior marketing director Chris Blessington told IT Europa that the need to look at data was changing. “Two years ago our products were sold where the customer had a problem to fix, perhaps after an outage. Now, however, the ability to examine every transaction across a business network means significant benefits to an organisation.
Where once its products were used in fire-fighting mode, the ability to continuously review data movements, applications and access is leading to more use as part of monitoring. By taking data from a network and looking at the metadata for visualisation, it can give a picture of the how the network is working.
“If you really want to see what is happening on a network, then you use the other tools such as agent solutions and logs, but you also need this omnibus, all-encompassing wired data approach. Networks have got complex and opaque enough that customers are willing to take on the challenge of having to understand and invest. That is our core proposition- to cut through the clutter.”
The US-based company is growing rapidly – 150-200% a year, but is under-represented in Europe, he says. With a particular facility in financial services, it has a core of partners in the UK where it does 15% of its total business and has been signing others in the Netherlands, and expects to open a German office later this year, looking for two senior sales people there. It has been working with distributor COMPUTERLINKS, and is 100% channel in Europe.
This is an eco-system sell – there are natural links to partners that supply SPAN and TAP network tools, then the next generation switch companies like Arista who understand intelligent switches and the future growth. “It is a obvious sale in this world – enterprises which have grown beyond human scale”. Financial systems in banks, and the healthcare market is a clear opportunity. “Insight is fantastic, but it is moving more to inference, what to do once an anomaly has been identified.”
An obvious stepping off point is virtualisation, since a close affinity with VMware, plus the ability to track events across virtual machines gives it a natural market here. Where he sees development of its sales is perhaps more in the ability to provide systems that anticipate issues; the rule-base it works to is already 2500 entries long, but the programming of application inspection triggers is relatively simple. It can be adjusted for particular behaviour or applications, which turn it into more of an expert system. “What we like is partners who take a more holistic approach to analysis,” he says. “We don't know every question a customer might ask, but we allow them or their partner to set them up.”
“We don't need partners with expertise on our products - we can train for that - but with a mind-set that understanding the client’s environment.” Solutions-oriented partners really understand this, he says. One novel use of the system has been within data centres; a unit on a trolley that can be moved around and connected to individual networks to do diagnostics as required. It is hooked up, the monitoring and diagnostics happens and then it moves on.