Vineyard Networks was founded in 2008 “to be the global technology leader in Network Monitoring for customers that require intuitive, easy to use solutions.” The company has raised approx. $2M through an initial round of angel investors and government R&D programs, and is projected to be cash flow positive for FY2010. Vineyard has 15 employees and is actively hiring.

Few companies have the technical resources, time, and money to invest in traditional network monitoring and management applications. Some netflow-based monitoring tools are affordable and relatively easy to use; however, they do not provide enough application-level visibility and only have information about what ports are being used.

Vineyard Networks has developed Network Traffic Monitoring and Management solutions for Small and Medium Enterprise. Vineyard Networks combines industry leading application visibility with ease of setup and use, and affordable total cost of ownership.

Vineyard’s Network Reporting Center (NRC) provides a powerful centralized monitoring and reporting solution for the Blue Coat PacketShaper family of products. NRC integrates easily with PacketShaper to provide dramatically improved network reporting and monitoring, enabling organizations to more effectively troubleshoot and monitor network and application utilization and performance. NRC is delivered as a software appliance or as NetCore, a cloud service. The latest version, NRC 2.5, supports Bluecoat, Cisco, Riverbed, Exinda, and Astaro.

A Global Dashboard provides an auto-updating view into top locations, top applications, and overall network health while the Exploring tab provides real time network troubleshooting tools to quickly and efficiently answer “right now” problems.

NRC is one of the only cloud-based centralized reporting console. It is extremely easy to use, making it accessible to both SMBs and large enterprises. The intuitive interface makes troubleshooting and exploring issues easy. The application aware solution integrates with multiple devices and provides a multi-device/multi-platform central network reporting solution and is very cost efficient.

Network Traffic Monitor (NTM) is a small network probe currently in beta and developed for market testing purposes.

Vineyard’s core product in the application probe space is its classification engine, Network Application Visibility Library (NAVL). NAVL is an application classification and attribute engine designed for OEM distribution specifically for enterprise gateway appliances in the security, visibility, and WAN OP Controller market.

NAVL focuses on the scalability and accuracy requirements of enterprise gateway appliances and applications. Most classification engines are designed for service providers, focusing on extreme throughput (10Gbps +) and high bandwidth applications found in the service provider environment (Peer2Peer, File Sharing, Streaming). This forces these engines to use simple classification methods such as regular expression matching and port-based classification.

The requirements for enterprise classification for security, routing, and networking are very different and enterprises typically require high accuracy at speeds under 10Gbps. Vineyard Networks has pioneered the concept of Deep Flow Inspection and Cross Flow Inspection. Its solution operates at wire speed to 10Gbps on X86-based platforms. It reassembles the flow in real time and searches for both data and behavioral patterns in the flow. In addition, Vineyard can string together multiple flows into a single session to accurately classify applications that use many small flows for communication like Supernode-based applications such as LimeWire, Torrents, and Skype.

NAVL will enable application visibility and awareness to all enterprise gateway appliance vendors and will create a uniform understanding of applications and network traffic. This information can then be collected by NRC to provide gateway network performance and usage reporting solutions and services (through MSPs, SPs, and gateway vendors) that enable customers to easily monitor and manage WAN and Internet usage, security, and performance.

Vineyard Networks targets the Small and Medium Enterprise Space (0-10,000 users) but has large enterprise customers and technology partners as well (such as Blue Coat).

There are myriad flow reporting engines; however, they are all focused primarily on netflow v5 reporting (layer 2/3) and are generic interface reporting engines (mostly for LAN reporting). Vineyard is application focused and is focused on the most common bottleneck in the network – the WAN or Internet Gateway.

There are also many classification engine providers, but they are primarily built for the Service Provider market (high scalability, network processors, application classification to control P2P, streaming, etc). Vineyard claims to be the only solution built specifically for X86-based enterprise network gateway appliances that require accuracy, scalability, and flexibility in typical X86-based environments.

NRC is available through MSP & SP providers in 15 countries, technology OEM partners, strategic VAR’s and resellers, and directly from Vineyard. Vineyard Networks has customers in nearly every vertical and of every size, in addition to its OEM customers and technology partners. Notable end users include Pushor Mitchell, a law firm, Alberta Library System, and Edmonton Public School District.

Jason Richards, President and CEO (previously held numerous roles in operations and sales at Packeteer)

Brent Bolleman, Chief Strategy Officer (previously founder and CEO of Ontain and Sonigistix)

Derek Lownsbrough, VP of Engineering (previously VP of Engineering at Itiva and lead technologist at Workfire)

Josh Zieske, Director of Operations (previously led the design and development of product quality frameworks at several network technology companies)