News

Packeteer Teams With Compaq, Others in ASP Initiative

• By Scott Bekker
• 11/02/1999

Packeteer Inc. (www.packeteer.com) has announced technology and service integration agreements with several leading companies, including Compaq Computer Corp., Citrix Systems, Inc. (www.citrix.com), InfoVista (www.infovista.com) and Portal Software Inc. (www.portal.com) as part of its application service provider (ASP) Initiative to bring comprehensive managed applications solutions to ASPs. Packeteer's ASP Initiative is focused on providing networked applications infrastructure for ASPs and consists of the new AppVantage system and the technology and service integration partnership agreements needed to offer complete customer solutions.

Under the terms of the technology and service integration agreements, Packeteer is working with these companies to build new services enabled by the AppVantage application subscriber management system. Other ASP application vendors are working with Packeteer to ensure that their applications are automatically recognized within a hosted environment that is enabled by the AppVantage system.

AppVantage is a policy-based application subscriber management system for the ASP market. The new system enables ASPs to ensure the performance of the applications that they are hosting. It also validates and presents reports that show that ASPs are meeting their obligations to their customers; provides a point of demarcation that delineates the ASP's and the customer's responsibilities; and integrates billing.

The system automatically discovers and classifies over 150 different enterprise, messaging, collaboration, and net-based telephony applications. Once classified, QoS and bandwidth-allocation policies protect and control each distinct application service for each customer.

Packeteer has signed agreements with solution vendors and service integrators to build additional services on the AppVantage platform. The partnership agreement with Compaq will have Compaq provide distribution and systems integration services to ASPs and will sell professional services based on the AppVantage platform. In addition, Compaq will resell or integrate jointly created turnkey QoS-based solutions for application hosting environments.

Packeteer has teamed with Citrix to enable AppVantage to support application services delivered across Citrix server-based computing environments and Web-based architectures. ASPs will be able to use AppVantage to set up separate policy classes to monitor and control published applications on Citrix servers. By ensuring that the AppVantage classification engine can identify applications running on the Citrix platform, ASPs can offer better control of application performance over the network.

The partnership with InfoVista, a provider of IT service level agreement reporting and analysis solutions, builds on the AppVantage platform and InfoVista's management and reporting engine, to provide tailored reports for ASPs. The agreement with Portal Software integrates AppVantage with Portal's Infranet software, a customer management and billing solution.

In the future, Packeteer will further enhance the AppVantage product line through technology innovations and solution and service partnerships for application-specific virtual private networks (VPNs), on-demand applications provisioning, and additional billing, OSS integration and enhanced reporting features.