SeaNet Aims To Improve Network Customer Service

That's the message behind SeaNet Technologies' SeaView Response Time Monitor (RTM), a new appliance that allows companies to log the transaction performance of individual user sessions, said Bernie Davidovics, SeaNet's founder and CTO.

The Kew Gardens, N.Y-based company demonstrated the technology this week at the Networld Interop conference in Las Vegas. The SeaView RTM appliance sits behind the firewall and monitors each individual transaction. It keeps a record of such details as which type of event occurred, the last change to the event, the user location, the user ID, a document ID (if applicable), the total network response time, the server response time and the network response time.

"Without RTM, [when] a customer or partner calls complaining about your slow network, usually all you can say is, 'Oh, we're having network problems right now, sorry,' " Davidovics said. "But with RTM, that same customer calls, and you just look at the log and say, 'Oh yes, Mr. Customer, we see here it took 32 seconds for you to get a response. We're working on that right now.' "

Such heightened degree of personalization is what SeaNet focuses on, Davidovics added. The RTM product feeds its data into SeaNet's SeaView Performance Data Base (PDB), which in turn can feed performance results into several popular network management platforms, including Smarts' network management platform, IBM's Tivoli and Hewlett-Packard's OpenView, he said.