This recognition validates ExtraHop’s position, as an emerging leader that’s taking network and application management in a new direction, one that’s better suited for managing all the complexities of today’s world.

Just a few things that I’d like to emphasize/add about this exciting news:

1. As usual, Jim Frey from EMA provided an insightful quote that captures a lot of the value that ExtraHop provides: “ExtraHop takes advantage of the network data and does rich, deep application packet analysis, which is definitely a step up from the traditional probe technology and it also addresses application team needs,” EMA’s Frey says. “This technology takes the capabilities of two tools and pulls them into one that can work for multiple groups in an organization.”

2. I feel like we can’t say this enough, we are very very proud of the stellar list of customers we have accumulated in this first year of selling, the article cites “ExtraHop lists Alaska Airlines, Continental Airlines, Microsoft, McAfee, Applied Discovery, Motricity, Nintendo and WhitePages among its customers.” I’d like to add, “and a lot more”. Yes I’m tooting our own horn here, but customers have consistently told us that they love ExtraHop because we’re knowledgeable and responsive, and the product actually does exactly what we say it would.

3. It was a great write up by Denise and we loved seeing her take. But I can’t resist sharing our perspective on why ExtraHop belongs on this list: With the weight of the enterprise resting on IT, complexity is spiraling out of control. IT manages an increasing number of geographically distributed applications and infrastructure with so many moving parts that something nearly always is broken. New technology, like ExtraHop’s agentless real-time transaction analysis, is required to keep pace with future demands. With some customers calling the ExtraHop system the “coolest technology” they have seen in 15 years, ExtraHop is aiming to shake up the world of network and application management.

Here’s a few articles that mentioned ExtraHop in their coverage of this story: from VentureBeat and GigaOm.

And lastly, a cool little video that one of our engineers put together to help show you why this particular investment of theirs is sizzling hot.

One of our competitors, NetQos was also mentioned in the article, but their customer is quoted as saying “NetQoS as primarily a network team tool.” Contrast that to the quote above, that spells out the distinct difference between the innovative performance managment alternative offered by ExtraHop and your more traditional network management tools.

Under the section that starts with: “Here is a small summary of the most interesting developments:”

Extrahop est une startup spécialisée dans la gestion des performances réseau conduite par des ingénieurs qui ont travaillé sur la solution BigIP de F5. Leur solution sans agent vise à identifier les origines de défauts de performances via l’analyse des données circulant sur le réseau, des couches 4 à 7. Leur solution semble très prometteuse sur un marché très fragmenté.

Yes I took 3 years of French in junior high, but I still couldn’t read that. So here’s Babelfish to the rescue:

Extrahop is a startup specialized in the management of network performances led by engineers who worked on the solution BigIP from F5. Their agentless solution aims at identifying the origins of defects of performances via the data analysis circulating on the network, of layers 4 to 7. Their solution seems very promising on a very fragmented market.

Nice, looks like our French IT compatriots have good taste in their Application and Network Management products.

And here’s some of the live chat that took place while I was being interviewed, whoever is BigSexy is a pretty astute viewer,

10:33 LukaX23 : Mac
10:34 LukaX23 : Interesting stuff…
10:34 BigSexy : this is way cool
10:34 BigSexy : netscout killer
10:35 LukaX23 : What exactly is this?
10:35 BigSexy : l4-7 tap with a bunch of intelligence on gathering performance metrics
10:36 DR : yep.. basics plus reporting
10:37 LukaX23 : And all this reporting, statistics, etc. is used for?
10:38 DR : well.. if you actually use the data…
10:38 DR : understand pain points, trend, take proactive actions
10:39 DR : as oppsosed to what normally happens… which is reactive behaviour to outages
10:40 DR : downtime, pain, dissatisfied customers… decrease in productivity..
10:40 DR : death, taxes, pestelencs… i think u get the picture

It seems like just yesterday when we came out of stealth and launched the 1.0 version of our Application Delivery Assurance system. Here we are, not quite 6 months later and already v2.0 is about to go out the door. Working with customers like you, we’ve focused this release around the themes of performance, visibility and out-of-the-box value.

Highlights of this release include our shiny new 10 GbE platform, Storage (CIFS and iSCSI) Module, LDAP Module, Dashboard Widgets and Trend-Based Alerting. Read more about it on the press release page, or check out Denise’s reporting on Network World.

In addition, we added a new set of Solution by Technology pages to the Extrahop website. See how we can help you tune Load Balancer/Application Delivery Controllers, optimize Database and Storage infrastructure, deliver better Cloud Services and effectively manage Virtual environments.

In other news, ZDNet featured an ExtraHop customer profile on their virtualization blog, see what makes ExtraHop extra hip (sorry if you cringed at the pun, what can I say, I’m in marketing!) in our customer’s own words.

The Reuters article also talked about how ExtraHop can take the pain out of troubleshooting and help IT become more proactive. At the same time, saving customers money by helping small teams work more efficiently with their time and maximize existing infrastructure investment. (Here they used the saving $1M dollar in unnecessary storage array example I blogged about the other day.)

We’re always happy to see our name in ink (whether real or digital), and Jesse is especially pleased about being quoted accurately, and in the right context.

In other news, engineer Ben recommends an article for our blog readers on 100 Gigabit Ethernet. As networks become more and more mission-critical, the world is apparently hungry for bandwidth.

Not to mention all the Twitter love this morning for ExtraHop, my co-worker Ben called it the “echo-chamber effect”, an astonishing amount of Tweets and Re-tweets on the funding news story. Of course my favorite is from LolCrunch, “APP MANAGEMENT SISTEM EXTRAHOP SCOREZ $5.1 MILLION IN SERIEZ FUNDIN”. So yeah, we appreciate all the Twitter-attention and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter!

- Helen