Stable-Net's global success

One of South Africa's local application performance management gems, Stable-Net, continues to put South Africa on the international map of network optimisation specialists.

The creators and pioneers of the Cisco Centre of Excellence, Stable-Net has grown from the brainchild of one of Cisco's sales business development managers for emerging markets' advanced network services (ANS), and a company comprising four members, to the Stable-Net Group, which holds a strong presence throughout emerging markets and continues to pioneer innovative, exciting and unique technologies, systems and solutions.

Now boasting established offices in Australia, Mexico and Dubai, and a staff complement of over 40 carefully selected experts in the their respective fields, Stable-Net continues to lead the way in this exciting sector of the economy.

“Emerging markets is a strong centre of focus for many of the larger international players in this sector,” explains Mathew Woodcock, the group's CEO and one of its original founders.

“Our positioning within a major financial centre of the emerging market world, together with the unique set of skills which we are offering, has led to our strong position across Oceania, Africa and the Middle East,” he says.

“We have trained local professionals in each of the offices we have set up, which remain 100% South African-owned. In this way, we are able to utilise an understanding of local market conditions, business practices and local languages, while still implementing and owning our unique network application solutions.”

Originally, Stable-Net's value lay in its ability to access and deliver NetQoS and Cisco solutions together, through adding its unique value-add to this already established partnership.

The partnership between Cisco and NetQoS enables customer service offerings that are critical in ensuring successful deployment of technologies. Cisco's ANS enables customers to accelerate, secure, and maximise availability of business critical applications, as well as improve deployment of service-oriented architectures.

The NetQoS Performance Centre is the only product suite that can provide global visibility into the core metrics necessary to manage and improve application performance across the world's largest networks. NetQoS helps organisations quantify the performance improvements derived from Cisco Application Delivery Networks deployed using Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) products and Cisco Application Control Engine (ACE) modules and appliances.

In July 2007, NetQoS and Cisco achieved an industry first by jointly developing a management interface for Cisco WAAS to provide accurate response time monitoring in a WAN-optimised environment. In January 2008, NetQoS announced advanced analytics support for Cisco ACE modules and appliances via the NetQoS Performance Centre.

According to Dave Clark, vice-president: emerging markets and strategic alliances at NetQoS, with Stable-Net as a partner, customers of both Cisco and NetQoS can enjoy maximised performance of their products.

Indeed, the centre of excellence service offering has been so successful that Stable-Net is now NetQoS's single biggest partner, which, through its local distributor MICROmega Technologies - also affiliated to the Stable-Net Group - has recently secured some of its largest deals in emerging markets.

In addition, Stable-Net recently received Cisco red-badge certification, allowing the company to act on behalf of Cisco for local Cisco clients, analysing and solving any Cisco-related problems.

The company has also expanded internally, and now includes, over and above the centre of excellence, an application centre through which Internet protocols (IPs) are developed; a managed services centre; and ScIAM, an innovative local information management solutions provider acquired by the group earlier this year.

There are also a number of changes already in the works, including the group's next step towards even further growth, all of which promises to soon establish Stable-Net as a household name - both locally and abroad.