Dan's Take

Each Transaction Tells a Story

The challenges of real-time data analysis is being tackled by INETCO.

• By Dan Kusnetzky
• 12/05/2016

INETCO is focused on real-time transaction monitoring and analysis. It starts with the interesting premise that each transaction tells a story, if the organization uses the proper tools to listen. INETCO believes that it has the best tools for that task.

The company is currently focused on addressing a couple of major trends we're seeing in the industry; they include digital transformation and ever-changing consumer habits, and how enterprises find themselves awash in data, yet still are often unable to find the required data.

The vendor has addressed itself to dealing with these common issues:

• Customers find issues before enterprise IT is aware of them. This is due to the fact that enterprises are fielding increasingly complex, highly distributed, multi-platform workloads constructed of independent services. It's very hard to know what is doing what in such a rapidly-changing, dynamic computing environment.
• Enterprise decisions are often based upon "feel" instead of "fact." This is highly related to the first issue. Complex workloads are generating operational data at an astounding rate, making it quite difficult to know where to begin when trying to determine the facts on the ground.
• Fraud and network attacks often go undetected until damage is done. This can be attributed to the change from a "smash and grab" approach to a "penetrate and lie low" approach that attackers have adopted.

INETCO says that it addresses these issues by offering technology that monitors individual transactions, as well as the supporting APIs and networks. It then analyzes the incoming data in real time and offers alerts, diagnostics, analytics and data visualization, making it easy for IT administrators and business decision-makers to know what's going on right now.

Dan's Take: Staying With What Works
INETCO isn't alone in making the observation that today's datacenter(s) are increasingly complex. They house collections of interconnected applications executing on many types of systems, operating systems, database tools and networks. That makes it increasingly difficult to determine what's happening and where, especially in real time. While INETCO's focus on deconstructing transactions and making it possible to learn who touched what and when offers useful insight, the company isn't the only one offering tools to address network and application performance management.

The company is small compared to some of its competitors, so it's focused on a few areas in which its tools can add significant value: real-time transactional analysis for banking and other financial service applications. By "sticking to their knitting," the company has seen significant growth over the years.

The company is also seeing success in other industries in which the detection of online fraud is a key issue including both travel and retail.

INETCO starts with an interesting set of ideas, and has built really useful tools. I intend to continue to watch them. If transactional systems are an important part of your IT environment, you might want to do that as well.