Visualize this Management product opens window to enterprise network >BY DAN O'SHEA, Technology Editor

One year after winning the New Product Achievement Award at the ComNet trade show, Visual Networks, maker of the Visual UpTime customer network management product, is returning with several major public network deployments under its belt.

Among them, Sprint Business, the interexchange carrier's business communications group, will demonstrate Visual UpTime in its booth this week in Washington. Sprint signed a contract with Visual Networks last fall to offer Visual UpTime as the management piece of its frame relay package. Using the product lets Sprint avoid the cost and complexity of installing frame relay port analyzers to monitor service and build usage reports, said Rob Markovich, vice president of marketing at Visual Networks, Rockville, Md.

The product, a client-server style managed access system, operates independently from frame relay switching. It consists of a centralized network database with platform-applicable clients that access collected real-time data, monitored information and archived data from different customer premises' servers and elements (see figure).

The product, which became generally available last month, responds to end users' increasing demands that their carriers provide higher-quality service and more extensive and immediate service use reports. Such products will ready carriers for the inevitability of usage-based billing for data services.

"End users want better management information from their service providers," said Markovich.

A few years ago, as carriers made their very first frame relay sales, they promised that they would deliver detailed service reports to customers so they could measure their own use and needs. "Carriers used to pull information off the switch and send it out to the user. It was a case of 'What can we roll up and give them?' rather than 'What kind of valuable information can we deliver on a timely basis?' For users, the reports they were getting were too little, too late. There was no real time aspect to the information," said Markovich.

Originally, Visual Networks designed the product mainly to be used by the customers themselves. It is already working in the private networks of Marriott, Bank of America, Dow Chemical and the U.S. Postal Service.

However, the company found that carriers also were interested because they wanted to offer better management to these private networks, which often represented their first real sources of broadband revenue. But carriers were concerned that Visual UpTime was not scalable or secure enough to analyze multiple growing networks and would not integrate well with their legacy operations support systems (OSSs), said Markovich.

The product now operates in most OSS environments, and in terms of security, Visual UpTime lets carriers monitor the services of two users at once. The users have partitioned views to maintain security.

Visual Networks also sells Visual OnRamp, a managed access system for Internet services, and plans to offer a version of Visual UpTime for ATM networks later this year.

The company also is working on deployments at AT&T, MCI, Compuserve and several Bell companies.