Privately held Packet Design has introduced the "MPLS WAN Explorer," to monitor both site-to-site reachability across service providers' MPLS networks and to verify that routing in providers' networks accords with service agreements. Nemertes' benchmark, Advanced Communications Services, finds 74% of participating organizations using MPLS in their WANs, and another 6% evaluating or planning to deploy. Rising use of carrier MPLS nets will increase IT's need to independently verify critical performance and compliance data.

Impacts:

Enterprises: Build, buy, or find among your management tools the ability to verify everything you care about in your MPLS SLAs.

Vendors: Make sure your suite of offerings can address MPLS management from both enterprise and service provider perspectives. If your tools can't tread both sides of the divide, make sure that's a conscious decision, not a missed opportunity.

Investors: Other enterprise-ready MPLS monitoring and management vendors will see growing demand, such as NetScout (NASDAQ:NTCT) and privately held NetQoS.

John Burke, Principal Research Analyst