industry spotlight

The Public Sector is leading the way in meeting many of the challenges faced by SMEs. Initiatives to get the 'UK Online' continue to be successful. Directgov, which combines public service information with online services, gets over 5 million visits per month.

All public sector organisations, from central and local government to the NHS, emergency services and charities, must either spend their IT budgets or have them cut, and they must prove they are delivering best value. Network service stability is critically important for the health and police services - if a network fails, human lives could be at risk!

Hundreds of UK public sector organisations use Highlight to address a common set of requirements: see network performance - identify potential issues - plan development and growth - manage multiple providers. When NetEvidence attended GCExpo in June alongside Pipex Business, these themes were consistently raised in discussions and seminars.

The public sector is extremely varied, but Highlight is applicable across network types and sizes. One UK charity recently added 160 locations on to Highlight, while a smaller local council added 25 sites, including schools, libraries and sports centres, to gain a central point of management for its distributed organisational structure.

The Public Sector will continue to drive progress, and its collective experience and knowledge will be shared at events such as SOLACE and SOCITM. NetEvidence expects to attend both conferences in October, and we look forward to seeing you there.

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At NetEvidence our two key principles have always been to provide our customers and partners with clear, fast visibility and help them share the information they can see. However, we realise that away from data networks it's not always easy to see the bigger picture and bring the world around us into sharper focus.

That's why we love this stunning new website from Nikon. One of the slickest Flash showcases we've ever seen, Universcale allows you to put the universe in perspective, comparing the relative sizes of objects from subatomic particles and microscopic organisms to buildings, mountains or even planets. How much smaller is your cat than your car? Or Mount Everest? Or the Crab Nebula? Flick your scroll-wheel and find out for yourself!

network news

Demand rises for networking skills

Networking skills will be in higher demand as IT spending increases and companies look to better support wireless LANs, VoIP and IP-based networks, according to a new report by Forrester Research. The data collated in the US market and analysed in Network World magazine, could be a strong indicator of things to come in the UK and EU. Forrester predicts the number of network systems and data communications analysts rocketing from 178,000 IT workers in 2006 to 198,000 network professional by 2008, while the number of network and computer systems administrators in demand is expected to grow from about 275,500 to over 311,000 by 2008.

Ethernet to achieve 100Gbit/s

Ethernet speeds are set to reach 100Gbit/s by 2010, according to a story on TechWorld. The Higher Speed Study Group (HSSG), part of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), will now work on a single standard that covers both 40Gbit/s, and 100Gbit/s speeds following months of debate between backers of the two speeds. If the IEEE approves the move late this year as expected, a single standard, to be called IEEE 802.3ba, could include specifications for both speeds standard in just three years. It is the first time an Ethernet standards task group has pursued two speeds in one standard.

Wisdom of crowds helps IT managers

Online communities help IT managers get the job done more quickly, a new survey claimed this month. King Research conducted an online survey of over 200 IT professionals, which revealed a majority tap online communities to help them solve technical problems on a daily basis. CIO magazine reported that while 93% of IT professionals admitted they are able to do their jobs more efficiently and save time by using IT communities to solve system administration issues, an astonishing 98% also said they trust the information in online communities to be "typically accurate".

feature focus

Highlight's Application Insight (AI)  adds application-level visibility and graphical reporting functions to give business people a better understanding of why network performance can vary.

Based on Cisco's NBAR capability, AI baselines legacy networks to present a clear business case for moving to advanced networking technologies with benchmarked Classes of Service (CoS) on MPLS, DSL or VPN tunnel networks. Shown in combination with traffic, trends, health and response time information (using PI), it is the ideal capability to visually demonstrate how business-critical applications perform to user expectations.

For more details about Highlight's Application Insight, please click here.

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highlight update

On a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) basis, Highlight is constantly being enhanced. Here are some new features you may not have noticed:

Performance Insight (PI) - supports alternative delay testing methods to ICMP (ping), more accurately reflecting user experience for HTTP page loads or via TCP port connection tests.

Improved Class of Service (CoS) support - in addition to the auto-detected visibility into each CoS, Highlight now supports multiple company-specific definitions

'Today' button - Click the Time Bar to change between Day, Week and Month views and scroll back and forth in time. Now, the 'Today' button instantly moves you to Detailed View for the current day.

Custom Applications - Your company's in-house applications use specific protocols that can be defined per company/folder for enhanced labeling and usability within AI.

Draytek ADSL capabilities - NetEvidence works with many vendors to add vendor-specific capabilities, although Highlight is hardware vendor independent, supporting any SNMP v2 MIB-II compliant devices.

Depending on the modules purchased, Highlight can display Traffic, Trends, Health, network Quality and Usage by Application on one page - for any day, week or month without loss of detail. Highlight's powerful, visual presentation is ideal whether you need a Business-level feel for how healthy a site is, or an engineer's detailed look at patterns and anomalies.