News

The path to the user has left the building

• By Jack Vaughan
• June 17, 2004

Development managers continue to face challenges as they deploy their apps over ever-wider networks. Among companies seeking to help address these challenges is RouteScience. The software company uses a decision-making engine that takes factors like application priorities and expected network behavior, and correlates this with real-time network performance to tune a network for optimal performance.

"We figured there was a need for real-time tuning of networks," said Mike Lloyd, CTO at RouteScience. "Congestion comes and there is a need for something to react." The focus is on those too-frequent occasions when businesses rely on someone else's network to handle its messages. The view the company tries to provide is more application-centric than network-centric.

As Lloyd poises the application delivery problem, it recalls the famous stage patter of Elvis Presley's emcee: "The path to the user has left the building."

RouteScience's software, according to Lloyd -- who previously served at Cisco as a principal architect and at Netsys Technologies where he worked on routing simulations -- can observe the network infrastructure from end to end, using application layer and network layer measurements to determine whether business policy objectives are being met. Adaptability is based on the fact that the RouteScience software can change the path an application takes through the network in real-time whenever the policy objectives are violated.

Version 5 of the company's ANS software, released earlier this year, improves reporting and application models. The company has forged deals with, among others, IBM Global Services to help customers build wide-area networks for "on-demand eBusiness" applications.