TIA Member Spotlight:
TIA welcomes one of its newest members, Apposite Technologies!
 Apposite Technologies was founded in 2005 to develop high-quality network test tools at reasonable prices. Our goal has been to make test tools more widely available to both IT managers and product developers and thereby improve the experience of the ultimate end users of applications.
The founders of Apposite came from a networking applications background, and we were continually frustrated by the lack of appropriate test tools for product development, Q/A testing, customer support and sales demonstrations. Freeware tools were available, but they couldn’t provide either the performance or precision we needed, while the cost and complexity of the high-end application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC)-based products used by test professionals put them out of reach of most users.
We saw that we could bring our unique expertise in efficient packet processing to develop networking test tools with performance and precision to rival ASIC-based platforms while taking advantage of commodity server hardware to bring the cost down by an order of magnitude. But we also realized that reducing the cost alone wasn’t enough – our products would be just one part of a broader toolkit and would be used occasionally or passed around among users, meaning they had to be ready to use out of the box, have an intuitive interface, and require no training at all. Our approach to product development is therefore a bit different from most networking equipment vendors, with a focus on quality, ease of use and cost, rather than on adding ever more features.
 President David Palter spent 10 years heading sales and marketing for Mentat through its acquisition by Packeteer in 2004. Mentat was a developer of TCP/IP stacks and other networking protocols, and came to prominence as a pioneer in TCP acceleration and WAN optimization technology. His involvement in WAN acceleration products led directly to the observation that nobody was building the tools customers needed to be able to benchmark our products, and he was personally frustrated at the lack of a simple, reasonably-priced link emulator he could use for product demos.
Prior to Mentat, he spent a long time in Japan, first as a research engineer at Kobe Steel and then in technical marketing for Hughes Electronics. He says, "I’m actually better known for my textbook on the Osaka-dialect of Japanese that a friend and I wrote for fun many years ago."
Mr. Palter spoke with TIA Network staff about Apposite Technologies.
 Please give us an overview of Apposite’s high-precision network emulation tools.
The Linktropy WAN emulation appliances simulate the conditions of a wide area network to test the performance of applications in the lab. By specifying the link bandwidth, latency, loss rate, and a few other optional parameters in the browser-based Linktropy interface, users can simulate any type of network, from terrestrial and Internet to wireless and satellite. This makes it easy for networking managers to see their applications as they will appear to users at their remote sites.
Within the Linktropy product line, there are now four models: the 4500, 7500, 7500 PRO and Mini. The 4500 emulates links up to 155 Mbps. The 7500 emulates a single link up to 1 Gbps, while the 7500 PRO version can emulate four gigabit links simultaneously. The Mini is a basic, portable model designed for sales people to carry around with them.
You recently announced the release of the Linktropy Mini. Tell us how this low-cost version of the Linktropy WAN emulator meets the needs of sales professionals and product resellers.
We had many users who told us they really liked the Linktropy appliances, but they needed something their sales people and resellers could carry around with them to customer sites and tradeshows for product demos. It didn’t need the full feature set of the lab models and didn’t need the same level of precision as a lab tool, but it had to be small and inexpensive. That motivated us to develop the Mini, which we just released in January. It’s built on a set-top box form factor, weighs only 3.5 lbs, and costs less than $2000.
How has the release of the Linktropy 7500 series expanded your presence?
Our original model, the Linktropy 4500, handles bandwidths up to 155 Mbps, and the majority of our customers were testing DSL, satellite, T-1 and other bandwidth constrained environments. The goal was usually to see how applications such as VoIP, e-mail, CRM and other corporate applications would perform between a central site and remote offices. Once we released the 7500 series, we found customers were using it quite differently – usually testing performance over high-speed lines where bandwidth was less of an issue than the effect of latency and packet loss. For example, even a few milliseconds of delay can cause a huge loss of throughput for remote backup or large file transfers over gigabit speed lines. So we found the 7500 tends to be used more for testing high-speed point-to-point applications, while the 4500 continues to be used for testing remote office applications. We also found the 7500 PRO to be particularly useful to application development teams, since its multi-link capability allowed multiple developers to take advantage of the tool simultaneously.
Tell us the value you gain from your TIA membership.
With products that simulate the conditions of telecommunication lines, our company lives at the intersection of networking applications and the physical networks themselves. But we find that networking people and telecom people seem to speak different languages and often misunderstand each other. With our role at that intersection, we hope that through TIA we can contribute to a better understanding of how applications will perform over different network environments and thereby lead to better products throughout the industry and higher satisfaction among application users.
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