A CEO Abroad: Tour of APAC Uncovers Visibility Trends with Global Reach

Last week, I had the pleasure of visiting with colleagues, customers, and both new and existing partners in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China. My thanks to all; you helped me gain invaluable insight into each of these unique markets and their technology requirements and priorities.

Hong Kong

No doubt, Hong Kong’s economy is undergoing significant change. Real estate prices are rising, the middle class is growing (in size, but not necessarily affluence), and the harbor that once was the busiest port in the region no longer holds the title. The commercial models are changing in Hong Kong. While Financial Services remains a strong vertical market, a number of others have have begun to wane in strength from prior years.

It is within the financial vertical, as well as the education and entertainment sectors, that demand for the Gigamon solutions and platform continues to grow. In particular, these businesses show considerable interest in using advanced applications, including Netflow and metadata generation, to:

• Ensure that analytics tools (e.g., Splunk) are fed the right information while also reducing traffic volume.
• Select specific application traffic from within the ever-increasing volume of network communications, and then forward that traffic to specialized security tools.
• Reduce the burden on various management and monitoring tools by removing redundant traffic or by decrypting it as necessary.

In short, big data security analytics and security architecture optimization are trends with global reach.

Taiwan

While technology has value, it’s not until a brand has a strong presence that it can command true value-based pricing and strong market adoption. Gigamon has been in the Taiwanese market for some time, and we are now starting to see broader pickup of our brand and the potential to make deeper in-roads.

In fact, after discussions with partners and press, I would venture to say that Taiwan could be one of the faster growing countries in the APAC region. Network and application performance monitoring remain common use cases, but with security quickly rising on priority lists, things are becoming even more dynamic. During one customer discussion, which quickly moved to the white board, it became apparent that their increasingly complex architecture was suffering from both “SPAN port contention” as well as the all-too-common challenge of over-subscription. After an hour—and an explanation of the power of GigaVUE-VM in a virtualized world—the customer was keen to kick off a proof-of-concept of our physical and virtual platform.

As customer conversations continued, it also became evident that our Application Session Filtering (ASF) solution is only just beginning a journey to the GigaSMART bestseller list. In fact, one particular prospect highlighted a solid ASF use case when he explained how he was looking for a way to inspect all traffic and, based upon the examination of the complete session, send traffic to unique management, security, and monitoring tools depending upon the format of the information (F-XML, F-ISO, F-EDI). This is the perfect use case for our ASF: inspect, match, and act.

China

Looking from the outside, China may seem to have its fair share of macroeconomic and growth challenges. However, after having met with several partners, prospects, and customers, I see considerable market opportunity for Gigamon. The financial services vertical and large-scale enterprises are looking for innovative approaches to tackle technological challenges while reducing overall management and monitoring costs. And while there are a handful of in-country solutions, there is strong perceived value in high-quality, high-capability, and referenceable international solutions.

What’s more, there was a good deal of talk and interest around software-defined networking (SDN), private cloud, and network security. I also heard from numerous tool vendors how they turn to Gigamon to find and deliver the right traffic. And at least one partner let us know of his company’s plans to commence an around-the-country program to educate their sales force—and by extension, their customers—regarding the Gigamon solutions and how they help with plans to scale and optimize large-scale networks, including those of service providers.