Partner Spotlight: LiveAction and Gigamon Team Deliver for NetOps

With its focus on network monitoring, management, and security solutions, LiveAction is a natural for Gigamon partnership. The company boasts impressive stats for customer return on investment (ROI) and troubleshooting resolution times, which are accelerated by adding Gigamon.

We spoke to Chris Braden, vice president of channels at LiveAction, to learn more about the company and how our joint solution gives customers network visibility and performance that benefits both IT teams and end users.

Gigamon: Who is LiveAction and what is the company’s history?

Chris: LiveAction provides network visibility and comprehensive insights, empowering network operation teams to take effective and intelligent actions for unprecedented network performance.

The company was founded in 2004 in Honolulu, Hawaii, and was tasked with creating a visibility engine for large volumes of Cisco network data for the U.S. government. We still partner closely with Cisco while working with most major network technology vendors and all three major public cloud providers.

LiveAction is proud to help provide true network intelligence for NetOps teams with our solutions: Our network performance management solution, LiveNX, provides comprehensive visibility across the entire network — on-premises, WAN, SD-WAN, cloud, or hybrid. We also offer LiveWire, an industry-leading full packet capture solution that captures and analyzes packets in real time and stores packet information for network and security forensics.

Gigamon: Describe your company culture. What makes you tick?

Chris: LiveAction is on a mission to bring comprehensive monitoring, unlimited control, and complete visibility to every network. Our fully remote team collaborates in a fast-paced and agile environment to build and deploy world-class network solutions. Our team is nimble, flexible, and driven to best support our resale partners, technology alliance partners, and customers.

We don’t like seeing unsatisfied or frustrated network engineers. And every organization relies on its networks, so network operation teams are business-critical. We understand how complicated network data can be, how many issues can arise, and the difficulty of tracking them down. And that’s only half the battle when it comes to remediation.

Our goal is to provide network operations teams the data they need, when they need it, with actionable recommendations to keep their networks running at their best.

Gigamon: If you had to describe Gigamon with just one word, what would it be?

Chris: Powerful. Gigamon has been a pioneer in the packet-broker space since its inception, and it continues to lead the way. In the process, Gigamon solutions have evolved from leading-edge technology to state-of-the-art for the industry and have generated the customers and market positioning that accompanies that status.

Gigamon: What are some of your market’s specifics, advantages, and challenges when it comes to network security and visibility?

Chris: Network infrastructure is always evolving, and organizations are forced to prioritize doing more with less while having to continuously justify their investments. At a high level, LiveAction simplifies complex networks, allows tool consolidation, and aids network technology or cloud migration projects.

Customers who implement LiveAction typically have a payback on their total investment in 12 months, see 153 percent ROI within three years, and experience significant savings by reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR) by 50 percent.

Gigamon: Which Gigamon features stand out the most and make the product outstrip its competitors?

Chris: Gigamon Application Metadata Intelligence (AMI) is highly saleable and efficient. With over 7,000 application attributes available on-premises or in the cloud, AMI gives customers deep application visibility where packets may not be needed.

Another selling point is easy access to traffic — from either physical networks or cloud and virtual environments, including public cloud and East-West virtualized data center traffic. All traffic is available — whether from virtual systems, containerized workloads, or cloud solutions — without native traffic mirroring. And Gigamon intelligent traffic filtering lets customers send just the relevant data to LiveAction or other tools.

Gigamon: What’s an anecdote that customers share when they talk about our joint solution?

Chris: As more customers adopt multi-cloud strategies, they need hybrid visibility across on-premises and public cloud environments to troubleshoot critical application performance issues. By combining LiveAction and Gigamon, these customers gain the visibility they need to achieve faster problem diagnosis and root-cause analysis. This joint solution helps ensure a high-quality experience for end users while supporting business growth.

Gigamon: What is the most memorable moment associated with Gigamon as a partner?

Chris: Our interactions with Gigamon have been consistently positive, from the executive team to the field organization to the solutions and engineering teams. This led to our teams presenting our joint solution together at both the Gigamon and LiveAction sales kickoffs.

Our partnership is built on a shared goal: providing customers with a scalable, cost-effective, and performant visibility solution.

Gigamon: What are the wow moments associated with Gigamon?

Chris: Gigamon’s ability to handle massive amounts of data in complex data center and public cloud environments.

Gigamon: What are some of the new challenges you see in the market that your partnership with Gigamon can solve?

Chris: Cloud visibility is a challenge for traditional network and security teams. Public clouds offer varying visibility options, and only some provide native traffic mirroring. Gigamon can simplify this challenge by delivering packets or application metadata to LiveAction. Gigamon can orchestrate traffic mirroring for end users in AWS and deploy virtual TAPs in Azure for the same observability.

Gigamon: What are the positive business outcomes as a Gigamon partner?

Chris: Working as an alliance partner with Gigamon, we can solve more business and technology problems for our customers, which enhances our relationships with them. Our ability to solve for these problems also enables LiveAction to reach more new potential customers. And working with the most visible brand in the packet-broker space is always an advantage.

Gigamon: What unique capabilities does this partnership bring to our joint business?

Chris: A key benefit is architectural flexibility. Whether the customer needs visibility for multi-cloud or on-premises data centers, the joint solution will provide consistent observability for application performance and security workflows. Customers can also gain visibility into encrypted traffic by using Gigamon AMI to send application metadata or packets to LiveAction products, including LiveNX and LiveWire.

LiveAction with Gigamon also speeds root-cause application performance troubleshooting in hybrid cloud infrastructure.

Gigamon: Who is the target audience (such as SecOps, NetOps, or DevOps) for our joint solution?

Chris: Our solution can help NetOps teams that are migrating to the cloud, need help with hybrid visibility on-premises and in the public cloud, or need East-West cloud or data center visibility. It’s also for customers looking for application performance visibility and troubleshooting or intelligent traffic filtering for specific visibility use cases.

This applies across many verticals, including finance, insurance, retail, healthcare, and higher education, just to name a few.

Gigamon: Thanks, Chris, for making time for us and for being such a wonderful partner!