Vineyard Networks Expands Application Visibility

The first step to controlling what's running on a network is to know what actually is running on the network.

That's where technology from Vineyard Networks comes into play. The startup provides its application visibility technology to networking vendors and service providers to enable them to identify applications. Vineyard Networks' executive leadership has its roots in Packeteer, an application visibility company acquired by Blue Coat for $268 million in 2008.

"What we do is we take two core areas, we have an application intelligence engine that analyzes a network flow in real time and then extracts all the application level attributes from it," Jason Richards, CEO and Founder of Vineyard Networks told InternetNews.com. "Then we have an application level reporting platform, which is a visualization interface that provides some insight into all the info that we extract from the data."

Richards added that Vineyard's path to market has been by way of partnerships with third party vendors in the network gateway space. Partners include Riverbed, Blue Coat and SonicWall among others.

"What we're really licensing is a service, it's not a one time product," Richards said. "We're providing the classification engine, but just as critical is the steady stream of application signature updates."

Richards noted that Vineyard has a well defined API for their platform which enables vendors to integrate the application visibility with their own respective platforms.

Vineyard is now expanding their Network Application Visibility Layer (NAVL) with a new release that grows application visibility even further. Richards explained that NAVL 2.7 provides a new custom definition interface.