The IT Nerd

BlueCat today announced the findings of a new report developed in collaboration with Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), The Network Observability Maturity Model: How to Plan for NetOps Excellence. An independent study of 252 IT leaders found that despite investing heavily in observability tools, most enterprises struggle to manage their networks effectively. Fewer than half (46%) consider themselves fully successful with network observability tools, underscoring the urgent need for a more unified and intelligent approach.

The report highlights the top challenges currently plaguing network operations teams: tool sprawl, limited visibility, poor data quality, and excessive alert noise. These gaps increase operational risk, delay troubleshooting, and expose enterprises to performance problems, security vulnerabilities, and costly downtime.

Key report findings include:

• Tool sprawl is pervasive: 87% of NetOps teams use multiple observability tools, creating inefficiencies and fragmented insights.
• Alert noise wastes resources: Only 29% of alerts are actionable, slowing incident response.
• Cloud and SD-WAN create blind spots: Teams lacking visibility into modern environments are far less successful.
• Data quality and telemetry matter: Real-time streaming data collection and accurate telemetry improve AI-driven analytics and proactive response.
• Dashboards enable alignment: Unified, customizable dashboards allow NetOps, SecOps, and CloudOps teams to share a single source of truth.
• AI-driven automation is the differentiator: Organizations advancing to solutions that are intelligent, automated, optimized, and AI-driven gain faster troubleshooting, predictive optimization, and capacity planning.

To help IT leaders resolve these challenges and maximize the value of their toolset, EMA and BlueCat developed the Network Observability Maturity Model, a five-stage framework that shows IT leaders what they can gain if they consolidate tools, expand visibility across hybrid environments, and embrace AI-driven automation. Ultimately, the framework helps IT stakeholders understand how they can optimize their toolsets to become a best-in-class NetOps practice.

The model also highlights how AI-driven automation can accelerate response times and problem resolution, a sign of the highest level of maturity. EMA’s research shows organizations advancing to “Intelligent and Automated” or “Optimized and AI-Driven” stages along this maturity curve are far more successful in preventing and rapidly resolving issues.

BlueCat’s network observability and intelligence solutions, including LiveNX, LiveWire, and LiveAssurance, help enterprises consolidate fragmented monitoring stacks and extend visibility across hybrid and multicloud networks. These solutions keep the network running without interruption by proactively ensuring its performance, security, and reliability. By pairing flow and packet data with customizable dashboards and AI-driven insights and root cause analysis from LiveAssist, BlueCat helps IT teams prevent downtime, surface issues before they impact the network, and ensure policy enforcement across distributed environments.

The full report is available here: https://www.liveaction.com/observability-report-2025/.

BlueCat today announced the appointment of Kevin Shone as its new Chief Financial Officer (CFO). Shone, who joined the company in August, will lead BlueCat’s financial strategy and oversee the company’s accounting, financial planning and analysis, legal, treasury, and IT functions.

With over two decades of financial leadership, Shone has held CFO positions at both public and private high-growth technology companies. Most recently, he served as CFO of Definitive Healthcare, where he guided the company through its successful IPO. His prior CFO experience includes Data Intensity, NextG Networks, and Unica. He spent a decade in senior leadership roles at Cognos Corporation, which IBM acquired for $4.9 billion in 2008. Shone began his career in corporate and tax law at Deloitte Touche and Riemer & Braunstein.

Over the past three years, BlueCat has made three strategic acquisitions while more than doubling its revenue and customer base. The Men & Mice, Indeni, and LiveAction additions have strengthened BlueCat’s portfolio and enabled the company to offer a comprehensive suite of Intelligent NetOps solutions to its customers.

BlueCat Networks has announced Peter Brennan as its new Chief Revenue Officer (CRO).

Brennan, who joined the company in January, is responsible for driving revenue growth and providing leadership for field teams, including sales, technical, channel, and alliances. Previously, he was the CEO for Scality, Inc., a leader in software-defined storage and data management, and the worldwide CRO for Scality, Grp.

Earlier in his career, Brennan achieved record growth over two decades in executive roles at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and VMware.

In October, BlueCat announced it was acquiring LiveAction, Inc., a global provider of network observability and intelligence solutions. Adding LiveAction’s industry-leading network performance monitoring, packet capture, and forensics offerings has strengthened BlueCat’s mission-critical DNS, DHCP, and IP address management (together known as DDI) and network infrastructure management solutions. Audax Private Equity is a strategic growth investor in BlueCat Networks.

BlueCat Networks, a leading provider of mission-critical network infrastructure management, automation, and security solutions, today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire LiveAction, Inc., a global provider of network observability and intelligence solutions, from software investor Insight Partners. Insight Partners remains a minority investor and continues to support the combined company’s growth. Moelis & Company acted as financial advisors to LiveAction.

LiveAction provides a leading network observability and intelligence solution that is purpose-built for complex enterprises, leveraging advanced data collection at scale to provide full visibility through a single pane of glass across the entire network.  The LiveAction solution is differentiated by its integrated flow and deep packet analysis, dynamic visualizations, precise troubleshooting, root cause analysis, rapid security forensics, and a superior set of integrations that enable both network and security teams to leverage network data across the observability stack.   Ultimately, LiveAction enables large organizations to get ahead of network performance and security issues before they impact applications, customers and business services.

BlueCat’s industry-leading DNS, DHCP and IPAM (“DDI”) solutions are the source of truth for what is on the network while automating and securing the provisioning, orchestration and configuration of foundational network services. Live Action’s fine-grain packet and flow telemetry become the ultimate source of truth for what is happening on the network–further empowering network and security teams alike. 

LiveAction was recognized as a Mature Platform offering, Strong Challenger and Outperformer in the 2024 GigaOm Radar Report for Network Observability, which evaluates key vendors in the category. The report discusses LiveAction’s observability strategy in leveraging the network as a vantage point for conducting application and traffic analysis to extract intelligence for network and security teams.  The analyst also highlighted LiveAction’s commitment to innovation, citing machine learning and advanced analytics for automated root cause analysis as well as application usage and performance baselining that enables automatic anomaly detection and alerts.  

The transaction is expected to close in October, financial terms were not disclosed.  

A report by EMA and BlueCat highlights that 72% of enterprises struggle to realize the full benefits of their cloud initiatives – and details how to avoid this issue

By Jim Williams, VP Marketing at BlueCat

Cloud adoption continues to grow at an exponential rate, reinforcing why it’s even more important that companies get it right. However, many are not.

For organizations to successfully transition to the cloud, both its cloud and networking teams must work hand in hand. Specifically, success hinges on a company’s ability to align both teams at all levels (design, implementation, and operation). Which begs the question – are you aware of how well your teams collaborate?

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) recently conducted a survey of 212 networking and cloud professionals, including multi-billion-dollar institutions, to explore the state of collaboration between the networking and cloud teams, analyze why their partnership is critical to a cloud investment, and how to ensure dysfunction doesn’t impact your organization’s cloud initiatives. 

What happens when your Cloud and Networking teams aren’t aligned?

Data from the report reveals that 72% of enterprises struggle to realize the full value of their cloud initiatives, and much of that this is directly tied to organizations’ failures to integrate network infrastructure teams into the cloud journey.

It also reveals that collaboration challenges between networking and cloud teams have directly resulted in:

–        Security & compliance issues at 73% of surveyed organizations, which include downtime, compliance violation, and data theft

–        IT operations issues at 89% of surveyed organizations, which include application performance problems, significant downtime, in addition to failed service rollouts

–        Business-level issues at 82% of surveyed organizations, which include productivity loss, cost overruns and budget issues, as well as customer loyalty and satisfaction  

Shamus McGillicuddy, the lead analyst on this research and Vice President of Research at EMA, says, “Applications are migrating to the cloud every day, so there is no time to waste. Industry leaders must recognize that the networking team offers intrinsic value to a cloud adoption initiative, and they should necessarily be an equal partner in the journey. Getting things like DNS and IP addressing right at the beginning of a cloud initiative can save millions of dollars and years in project time.”

How to ensure strong collaboration between your teams

To prevent the above, EMA recommends enterprises take the four following steps to establish stronger partnerships between network and cloud teams:

1)     Make collaboration a C-level initiative

Only 34% of research participants believed that executive leadership is doing a very good job at pushing for better collaboration, whereas very successful enterprises were almost twice as likely to say so (58%). This underscores that an emphasis on alignment coming from the C-level leads to a higher probability of both teams working in sync. Leaving staff further down the hierarchy to stitch together a poorly designed hybrid environment is a recipe for failure.

2)     Give the network team an equal seat at the cloud table

For cloud adoption to run smoothly, the network team must have input and visibility into the design of hybrid networks. 88% of research respondents believe that the on-premises network team must have visibility and input into cloud design.  IT leaders must push for processes and procedures that allow both groups visibility across the hybrid cloud environment.

3)     Unify and modernize across domains

Many enterprises are unifying DNS management and security across on-premises and cloud networks. Nearly half also fully unify compliance management. By contrast, almost all unsuccessful cloud adopters report silos within IP space management. Siloed management of critical services like DNS and IP space management is almost certainly a bad strategy.

4)     Ensure each team is trained on all the necessary skills

IT execs need to close the skills gaps between their two teams. Cloud teams have a limited understanding of networking, and network teams are not up to date with the tools and solutions that cloud teams use. Skills gaps can be closed via training (for example, somebody should know the difference between DNS service capabilities offered by the major cloud providers) and by giving network and cloud teams access to technologies and tools used by their peers in the other silo. Shared access to tools and technology will give these teams hands-on experience that will help them acquire skills.

IT executives must accept that addressing dysfunction between cloud and networking teams should be high on their agenda, and that they should start by empowering network teams to become equal partners in the cloud journey. Too often, networking teams get involved too late, and this results in costly problems. Organizations with networking and cloud teams that are aligned get the most out of their cloud investment.

A detailed analysis of the research findings is available in the full report here.