IBM invests in NetPriva

IBM Australia's network integration and consulting business Cerulean has acquired a minority shareholding in Australian network performance management tools developer NetPriva.

Under the agreement, Cerulean would also distribute and support NetPriva's NP software products, which are designed to improve network performance.

The acquisition gave NetPriva "great access" to new customers in Australia and New Zealand, said Alan Noble, CEO at NetPriva, who is also a shareholder in the company. "Their [Cerulean's] network consulting and integration business complements our products very nicely," he said.

Noble said the investment demonstrated the need for both monitoring and control of IP networks. "NP's monitoring, control and historical analysis at a per second granularity enables customers to reduce IT support costs, reduce or contain bandwidth costs and improve user response and productivity," he said.

The company's latest product, NP version 4, goes right to the desktop identifying both the user and the application and does so before the data may be encrypted or compressed, Noble recently said.

"This means NP can cut network performance management troubleshooting down to seconds and minutes instead of hours, days or longer. And NP's easy to use policy based management of traffic means that network trouble spots can be proactively identified and eliminated."

It was expected that NetPriva would be profitable soon. The company acquired the assets of software developer Foursticks in April 2005.

Over the past few months, NetPriva has secured some new customers including Cerebos, Huhtamaki, Gunns Ltd and Mueller Milch.

NetPriva's head office is in Adelaide. The company also has partner sales and support offices in the Netherlands and Germany.