NetScout Systems, Inc. (NetScout) provides service assurance and cybersecurity solutions that are based on its pioneering deep packet inspection technology at scale, which is used by many Fortune 500 companies to protect their digital business services against disruption.
Service providers and enterprises, including local, state and federal government agencies, rely on the company's solutions to achieve the visibility and protection necessary to optimize network performance, ensure the delivery...
NetScout Systems, Inc. (NetScout) provides service assurance and cybersecurity solutions that are based on its pioneering deep packet inspection technology at scale, which is used by many Fortune 500 companies to protect their digital business services against disruption.
Service providers and enterprises, including local, state and federal government agencies, rely on the company's solutions to achieve the visibility and protection necessary to optimize network performance, ensure the delivery of mission-critical applications and services, gain timely insight into the end user experience and protect their networks from attack. With its offerings, customers can quickly, efficiently and effectively identify and resolve issues that result in downtime, interruptions to services, poor service quality or compromised data, thereby reducing meantime-to-resolution of issues and driving compelling returns on their investments in their networks and broader technology initiatives. Some of the more significant technology trends and catalysts for the company's business include the evolution of customers' digital transformation initiatives, such as the migration to cloud environments and the edges of their networks, the rapidly evolving cybersecurity threat landscape, artificial intelligence and business analytics, and the 5G technology in both the service provider and enterprise customer verticals.
Markets
The company's service assurance solutions are used by enterprises (including government agencies) and service providers to optimize network performance, quickly identify and resolve issues impacting application and service quality, and to gain insight into the end user experience. The company's cybersecurity solutions are used by enterprises and service providers to identify and mitigate advanced, volumetric, and application-specific distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, as well as assist enterprise security teams in rapidly identifying, isolating, investigating, and resolving other advanced network threats. These combined solutions provide a powerful platform to address both service assurance and cybersecurity challenges for its customers.
Enterprise Market
Within the enterprise market, NetScout's nGeniusONE, ISNG, Omnis Cybersecurity solutions, and Arbor Edge Defense offerings enable IT organizations to support a growing range of performance management and cybersecurity use cases including:
Network Performance Management - The company's nGeniusONE analytics and its ISNG real-time information platform provide the necessary insight to optimize network performance, restore service and understand the quality of the users' experience. By integrating certain acquired product lines and product features into the company's core offerings, its customers can benefit from a consistent view across their traditional wired network infrastructures, remote offices, and wireless networks (WiFi).
Application Performance Management: Data Center Transformation and Cloud Computing - The company enables information technology (IT) organizations, from their development operations to their infrastructure teams, to manage the delivery of services across virtual and physical environments, providing a comprehensive, unified real-time view into network, application, server, and user communities' performance. The company proactively detects emerging issues with the ability to help analyze both physical and virtual service delivery environments within the data center which enables organizations to optimize datacenter infrastructure investments, protect against service degradations, and simplify the operation of complex, multi-tier application environments in consolidated, state-of-the-art data centers. The company's solutions are often used by enterprises to support private cloud computing environments that are aimed at enabling greater, more cost-effective accessibility to applications without compromising the reliability and security of those applications and the network. The company's solutions portfolio also includes a range of virtual appliances that can help enterprise customers extend their monitoring of applications deeper into their traditional or colo data centers, confidently migrate applications into public cloud environments, and gain a comprehensive, cohesive view into the resulting hybrid cloud environment.
Unified Communications (UC) - The company delivers deep application-level unified visibility into voice, data and video services side-by-side in order to understand the interrelationships of all UC services that traverse the network infrastructure and assess quality and performance of the delivery of these services. As a result, the company's real-time, actionable intelligence helps customers to deliver a high-quality UC experience as users make calls, video conference and engage in instant messaging. The company also helps desktop, network, telecom, and application teams manage UC through a common platform across complex, geographically dispersed, and multi-vendor environments.
Software-as-a-Service and Infrastructure Performance Management - The company also provides enterprise customers with active agent-based offerings that can help them determine availability and performance levels for software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, and gauge the health of servers, routers and switches, as well as wireless and virtual infrastructures. As a result, customers can continuously monitor the performance of key business services and the infrastructure used to deliver them, regardless of how applications are deployed or where the user is located. Deployed independently or as part of its broader service assurance solution, these products also play an important role in helping enterprises deliver a superior user experience, achieve outstanding service quality and drive better returns on their application and infrastructure investments.
Application and Desktop Virtualization - The company provides clear and actionable insights that help customers fully realize the operational benefits associated with Application and Desktop Virtualization and reduce the time it takes to identify and resolve service problems. The company offers visibility across all virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) tiers, including remote access, client, virtualization, web, front-end application, and related database systems, and help customers gain actionable metrics and insight from monitoring and analyzing the consumption and performance of VDI services.
Cybersecurity: DDoS Protection and Omnis Cyber Intelligence - Computer networks continue to be targeted for cyberattacks that are aimed at disrupting, damaging, or otherwise destroying an enterprise's ability to conduct its business or gaining unauthorized access to corporate applications and restricting or stealing valuable information. The company provides a range of network security solutions under the NetScout Arbor brand that enable enterprises to protect their networks from high-volume and application-specific DDoS attacks, which are aimed at either overwhelming the network with traffic or over-exercising specific functions or features of a website with the intention to disable those functions or features. The company has also recently developed enhanced cybersecurity solutions for enterprises with its Omnis Cybersecurity suite of products that provide greater deep-dive forensic capabilities, as well as analytics that can provide visibility into anomalous behavior on the network that may be indicative of an advanced threat. These security analytics enable existing enterprise customers to leverage their historical investments in NetScout's service assurance solutions by using the Adaptive Service Intelligence (ASI) data already being generated to support service assurance for cybersecurity use cases.
Government Markets
Considered as part of its enterprise customer vertical, the company has built a strong position with federal, state and local government agencies, both in the United States and abroad. Similar to the company's enterprise customers, government agencies are focused on streamlining and transforming IT into more efficient and more easily managed environments.
Telecommunication Service Provider Markets
The company's service provider solutions support an expanding range of use cases, including:
Service Assurance for Mobile, Fixed Line and Cable Operators - The fundamental transformation of the mobile network to all-IP enables mobile operators to build highly-scalable service delivery environments to offer new services to meet the growing subscriber demand for data, voice and video-centric services and to consolidate and simplify network operations. Mobile operators use the company's offerings to gain real-time, detailed IP packet-level insight and core-to-access visibility, which enables them to ensure services offered over the network meet certain pre-defined quality levels for an optimal subscriber experience. The company's service assurance solutions help service providers effectively manage capacity, assess overall network quality, take proactive steps to modify the network before issues impact subscribers, and quickly identify and troubleshoot network problems. In addition to improving the overall return on their network infrastructure investments, mobile operators using the company's solutions also benefit from improved network quality and unique customer insights - both of which contribute to subscriber acquisition, retention, and monetization. The growing demand for high-bandwidth triple-play services, broadband connectivity, content anywhere, IP-TV, on-demand video traffic, newer 5G technology, extended WiFi initiatives, and carrier Ethernet services presents fixed line and cable multi-system operators with significant revenue opportunities. IP has become the de facto convergence mechanism for access, distribution and core networks, enabling new service offerings and simplifying network operations while reducing total cost of operations. For example, cable operators use the company's solutions to monitor and manage their local area WiFi connectivity services, ensure the high-quality delivery of video to consumers outside of their homes as well as provide broadband and telephony services targeting small- and medium-sized businesses.
Business Intelligence for Service Providers - Service providers strive to understand how the performance of their networks impact customer experience, subscriber behavior and related usage trends. By combining network traffic data with other information, including support requests, subscriber calling plans, demographic data and other details, service providers can make more timely decisions about their offerings and sales and marketing initiatives to acquire, retain and further monetize their subscribers. The company's analytics deliver timely insights into a service provider's subscribers, services, networks, and applications, as well as easy export capabilities so that this information can be integrated into their data lakes and third-party analytic platforms.
DDoS Protection - Internet Service Providers (ISPs), including leading telecommunications providers, cable multi-service operators and cloud providers, have seen significant increases in the sophistication, scale and frequency of high-volume and application-specific DDoS attacks on their networks. DDoS attacks are aimed at disrupting the online services of an ISP's business customer by overwhelming the network with traffic or by over-exercising specific functions or features of a website with the intention to disable those functions or features. NetScout Arbor smart DDoS solutions are used by a wide range of ISPs around the world to help protect their networks against DDoS attacks, and to resell certain DDoS offerings to their enterprise customers.
Products
Using its patented ASI technology, the company's solutions instantaneously convert network traffic data, often referred to as wire data, into high-value metadata, or smart data. The company's offerings can help customers quickly identify and troubleshoot network and application performance issues, defend their networks from DDoS and other cybersecurity attacks, and rapidly find and isolate advanced network threats. The company's solutions are deployed by customers in one of four form factors: as integrated hardware and software appliance, as software only that is then integrated into commercial off-the-shelf hardware, in a virtualized environment as software only, or as a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution. The company's solutions help its customers meet the increasing demands and an ever-changing technology landscape of IP networks, service, applications, and cybersecurity threats. To further elevate its value proposition and address the near- and long-term needs of customers and prospects, the company has delivered major product upgrades across its product lines by integrating key functionality from acquired product lines, increasing the deployment flexibility of its solutions, and adding new features and capabilities that enable it to address a broader range of use cases. The company's primary products can be categorized as follows:
Service Assurance Solutions for Network Application Performance, and Business Intelligence Analytics
nGeniusONE Management Software and Analytic Modules - The company's nGeniusONE management software is used to support its service provider, enterprise, and government customers enabling them to predict, preempt, and resolve network and service delivery problems while facilitating the optimization and capacity planning of their network infrastructures. Additionally, the company markets a range of specialized platforms and analytic modules that can enable its customers to analyze and troubleshoot traffic in radio access network and WiFi networks, as well as gain timely insight into high-value services, applications and systems, and better understand the subscriber's experience on the network. nGeniusPULSE is an active testing tool that enables enterprises to identify infrastructure performance issues and determine application availability, reliability, and performance. The company also markets its nGenius Business Analytics solution, which enables service providers to quickly and efficiently analyze their network traffic to gain greater and more timely insights into their subscribers, services, networks, and applications, as well as easily export its smart data into their data lakes and into third-party analytic platforms.
Visibility Products (Probes, Packet Flow Systems and Taps) - The company's ISNG platform provides real-time collection and analysis of information-rich, high-volume packet-flow data from across the network that is displayed through the nGeniusONE Service Assurance Solution. The ISNG is an advanced passive network probe that can be deployed as a traditional appliance with integrated hardware and software, as software-only for use in commercial-off-the-shelf hardware or in virtualized or software only form factors. The virtualized form factor version of the company's intelligent data source, which is marketed as vSTREAM, can be deployed to support NFV environments, as well as to monitor application performance in traditional data center, private cloud, and public cloud environments. The company also provides comprehensive packet flow systems (also called network packet brokers or network visibility fabric switches), that deliver targeted network traffic access to a range of monitoring and cybersecurity tools and systems, including the nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform. Additionally, the company markets a suite of test access points (TAPs) that enable full, non-disruptive access to network traffic with multiple link type and speed options.
Cybersecurity Solutions
DDoS Protection - The company provides cybersecurity solutions that enable service providers and enterprises around the world to protect their networks against DDoS attacks under the Arbor brand. Certain of the company's service provider customers around the world also resell Arbor's solutions as a managed DDoS service to their enterprise customers. The company's portfolio of DDoS solutions offers complete deployment flexibility spanning on-premises offerings and cloud-based capabilities to meet a broad array of customer needs, as well as specialized analytics and comprehensive threat intelligence information. The company's smart DDoS offerings for service providers include Arbor Sightline for DDoS visibility and threat detection, Arbor Threat Mitigation System for removing DDoS attack traffic from the network without disruption to key network services and Arbor Insight for advanced analytical and forensic information. The company's smart DDoS offerings for enterprises include Arbor Edge Defense, a perimeter-based appliance for identifying and blocking incoming DDoS attacks and outbound malicious communications, and Arbor Cloud, a global, cloud-based traffic scrubbing service that quickly removes DDoS attack traffic. The company plans to further enhance and expand these capabilities in ways that will enable greater adoption of its solutions by service provider and enterprise customers.
Advanced Threat Detection - The company has actively expanded its enterprise cybersecurity offerings into the Network Detection and Response (NDR) market to better leverage the investment that its enterprise customers have made in its traditional service assurance solutions. By collecting network traffic via the company's probes, it can expand its value proposition by providing specialized analytics for both service assurance and cybersecurity offerings. The company continues to advance solutions such as new packet forensic capabilities, which includes Omnis Cyber Intelligence, designed specifically for security operations teams. This solution also creates anomalous behavior analytics that security teams can use to identify and investigate potential advanced network threats. The company's Omnis suite of products focuses on addressing cybersecurity use cases.
Integration with Third-Party Solutions
To have greater operational impact on assuring performance of applications and service delivery, the company has integrated its technology with third-party management consoles and business service management systems. This integration allows organizations to receive alarms on impending performance problems and to link into the nGenius Service Assurance solution in order to perform detailed problem analysis and troubleshooting. The third-party solution providers that the company has integrated its solutions with include Cisco Systems, Cisco Sourcefire, Citrix Systems, Dell Technologies, Hewlett-Packard Company, IBM Tivoli, and VMWare. In addition, the company has embedded NetScout Arbor DDoS mitigation capabilities on a blade within Cisco's market-leading ASR9000 router and will continue to evaluate partnership opportunities to support integration of its smart DDoS capabilities into various third-party platforms.
Growth Strategy
The key elements of the company's strategy include driving platform innovation; deliver pervasive visibility; extension into adjacent markets; fortify and expand existing customer relationships; expand its customer base; increase market relevance and awareness; extend its technology partner alliance ecosystem; and pursue strategic acquisitions.
Support Services
The company's support programs offer customers various levels of high-quality support services to assist in the deployment and use of its solutions. The company has support personnel strategically deployed across the globe to deliver 24/7 support to its customers. Certain support services, such as on-site support activities, are provided by qualified third-party support partners. In addition, many of the company's certified resellers provide Partner Enabled Support to its end users. This is especially prevalent in international locations where time zones and language, among other factors, make it more efficient for end users to have the reseller provide initial support functions. The company's support also includes updates to its software and firmware at no additional charge, if and when such updates are developed and made generally available to its commercial customer base. If ordered, support commences upon fulfilment or expiration of the standard warranty for software. For software, which also includes firmware, the standard warranty commences upon fulfilment and expires 60 to 90 days thereafter. With regard to hardware, the standard warranty commences upon fulfilment and expires 60 days to 12 months thereafter.
Sales and Marketing
Sales
The company sells its products, support and services through a direct sales force and an indirect reseller and distribution channel.
The company's direct sales force generally uses a ‘high-touch’ sales model that consists of face-to-face or virtual meetings with customers to understand and identify their unique business challenges and requirements. The company's sales teams translate its customers' requirements into tailored business solutions that allow the customer to maximize the performance of its infrastructure and service delivery environment. Due to the complexity of the systems and the capital expenditures involved, the company's sales cycles typically take between three and twelve months. The company builds strategic relationships with its customers by continually enhancing its solutions to help them address their evolving service delivery management challenges. In addition to providing a comprehensive solution to meet these needs, the company continually provides software enhancements to its customers as part of their maintenance contracts with the company. These enhancements are designed to provide additional and ongoing value to its existing customers to promote loyalty and the expansion of their deployment of the company's products. Existing customer growth is also driven by the expansion and changes in their networks as they add new infrastructure elements, new users, new locations, new applications, experience increasing service traffic volumes, or encounter incremental cyber threats.
The company also maintains an indirect reseller and distribution channel. Sales to customers outside the United States are primarily export sales through channel partners. The company's channel partners assist it by improving its reach to customers, extending its presence in new markets, and marketing and selling its products to a broad array of organizations globally. The company sells through a range of channel partners, including value-added resellers, value-added distributors, resellers, and system integrators, to its enterprise, service provider and government customers. Historically and currently, the company has used indirect distribution channels principally as intermediaries on contractual terms for customers with whom it does not have a contract. The company's sales force meets with end user customers to present its products and solutions, conduct demonstrations, provide evaluation equipment, recommend detailed product solutions, develop product deployment designs and timelines, and assist in establishing financial and other justifications for the proposed solution. During this selling process, a channel partner, who has contracts with both the end customer and the company, may be brought in to facilitate the transaction and to provide fulfillment services. In the case of international channel partners, those services usually also include currency translation and support. In the U.S., fulfillment services are usually limited to invoicing and cash collection. Under this approach, the company has limited dependence upon channel partners for the major elements of the selling process. In many cases, there are multiple channel partners with the required contractual relationships, so dependence on any single channel partner is not significant.
Marketing
The company's marketing organization drives its market research, strategy, product positioning and messaging, and produces and manages a variety of programs, such as customer forums, trade shows, industry events, advertising, public and analyst relations, social media, direct mail, seminars and webinars, sales promotions and other online marketing programs. These programs are focused on promoting the sale and acceptance of the company's solutions to further build the NetScout brand for its service assurance and cybersecurity products within the marketplace.
Key elements of the company's marketing strategy focus on thought leadership, market positioning, market education, go to market strategies, reputation management, demand generation, and the acceleration of its strategic selling relationships with local and global resellers, systems integrators, and its technology alliance partners. During fiscal year 2025, the company continued to invest in the promotion of the NetScout brand related to service assurance and cybersecurity products in their respective markets. The company expects to continue these initiatives during fiscal year 2026.
Seasonality
The company has experienced quarterly variations in its order bookings as a result of a number of factors, including the length of the sales cycle, complexity of customer environments, new product introductions and their market acceptance and seasonal factors affected by customer projects and typical IT buying cycles. Due to these factors, the company has historically experienced stronger bookings during its fiscal third and fourth quarters than in its fiscal first and second quarters (year ended December 2024).
Customers
The company sells its products to enterprises, service providers and local, state, and federal governmental agencies with large-and medium-sized high-speed IP computer networks. The company's enterprise customers cover a wide variety of industries, such as financial services, technology, manufacturing, healthcare, utilities, education, transportation and retail, as well as government and associated agencies. The company's telecommunications service provider customer group includes mobile operators, wireline operators, cable operators, internet service providers, and cloud providers.
Competition
In the enterprise market, the company’s competitors include companies who provide network performance management, application performance management, infrastructure performance management and other related solutions, such as CA Technologies (a Broadcom Inc. business), Cisco Systems, Dynatrace, Datadog, ExtraHop, IBM, Infovista, Viavi, Gigamon, New Relic, Riverbed Technology, Splunk (a Cisco Systems business) and SolarWinds. In addition, the company both competes with and partner with large enterprise management vendors, such as HP and IBM, who offer performance management solutions.
In the service provider market, the company competes with traditional probe vendors, network equipment manufacturers, big data and analytics vendors, and virtualization vendors. These vendors include Anritsu, Cisco, Ericsson, EXFO, Huawei, IBM, Infovista, Niksun, Elisa Polystar, Radcom, Splunk (a Cisco Systems business), Nokia and Viavi.
In the service provider DDoS solutions market, the company competes under the NetScout Arbor brand with a broad range of vendors, including Radware, Akamai, F5 Networks, A10 Networks, Fortinet, Fastly, Cloudflare and Corero Network Security. In the enterprise market for Network Detection and Response (NDR) solutions that utilize specialized threat analysis, traffic analysis, and packet forensics to detect and raise alerts of advanced network threats, the company competes under the NetScout Omnis Cybersecurity brand with a range of vendors, including Darktrace, Vectra Networks, Extrahop, Cisco, and other specialist providers.
Government Regulation
As a company with global operations, the company is subject to a variety of evolving regulatory requirements in the countries in which it operates or in which it offers its service assurance and cybersecurity solutions, including, among other things, data privacy, AI, information security, export, antibribery, and other legal, regulatory, and compliance requirements. Additionally, to the extent the company collects personal information from individuals outside of the United States, it is, or may become, subject to foreign data privacy and security laws, such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR). Foreign data privacy and security laws impose significant and complex compliance obligations on entities that are subject to those laws.
The company is also subject to global laws and regulations that govern or restrict its business and activities in certain countries and with certain persons, including the U.S. Commerce Department's Export Administration Regulations and economic and trade sanctions regulations maintained by the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC), as well as anti-bribery and anti-corruption laws and regulations, including the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and the U.K. Bribery Act.
History
NetScout Systems, Inc. was founded in 1984. The company was incorporated in Delaware in 1984.
