OPNET APM Xpert(TM) Solutions Receive Accolades From Enterprise Management Associates

• New EMA Impact Brief highlights rich functionality and proven capabilities of AppMapper Xpert ™ offering
• Expands upon EMA's top ranking of OPNET's APM Xpert solutions, including "Best Operational BSM" and "Value Leader" with "#1 overall feature strength"

BETHESDA, Md., March 22, 2011 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- OPNET Technologies, Inc. (Nasdaq:OPNT), a leading provider of solutions for application and network performance management, today announced recognition by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) in a new research report, " OPNET AppMapper Xpert Brings Real-time Perspectives to Application Ecosystem Performance and Optimization," published last week. The report expands upon other recent EMA reviews of OPNET APM Xpert solutions.

According to the new research report's primary author, Dennis Drogseth, VP of Research at EMA:

"OPNET's early 2011 introduction of AppMapper Xpert is not only the most recent, but arguably the most complete system for bringing true application-ecosystem currency, with its many software and infrastructure interdependencies, into a broader service management context ."

Mr. Drogseth explained further that, "While OPNET's core buyer set is in Operations, the company has branched out to support a growing constituency in application management. EMA believes the Application Discovery and Dependency Mapping (ADDM) market is evolving out of necessity to support a wide variety of technologies with a growing focus on real-time or run-time currency, ease of deployment, richer service impact information, and more evolved support for virtualization and Cloud environments.  OPNET's AppMapper Xpert embodies all of these trends, and as such should provide increasing value to customers while serving as a catalyst for positive industry advancement."

AppMapper Xpert provides dynamic run-time application infrastructure reports based on data sets supplied by other APM Xpert solutions. These solutions monitor and trace application activity across the operational environment, gathering fine-grained data from a broad range of sources, including application frameworks (.NET and Java), database servers, network traffic, virtual and physical operating systems, and management solutions, such as VMware vSphere. 

In Q3 2010, EMA published two research reports in which individual OPNET APM Xpert solutions that feed data to AppMapper Xpert were reviewed. Products from various vendors were ranked into four tiers: Value Leader, Strong Value, Specific Value, and Limited Value based on cost, deployability, architecture, and functionality. In both reports, OPNET solutions ranked in the highest tier, Value Leader.

The first report, "EMA Radar for Application-Aware Network Performance Management," reviewed 18 vendors based on their ability to provide application awareness across a range of network and application technologies. Although the network is only one of several sources of application awareness provided by the OPNET APM Xpert suite, OPNET was one of only two vendors to receive the Value Leader distinction. According to author Jim Frey, Research Director at EMA, "OPNET ranked #1 overall in feature strength, supported by top rankings in application discovery/recognition, metrics and measurements, capacity planning, and advanced analysis."

The second report, " EMA Radar for Business Service Management (BSM)," ranked 14 vendors based on their ability to bring together a unified view of IT service performance as it impacts business outcomes. OPNET again received the Value Leader distinction and a special award for "Best Operational BSM" offering. Among OPNET's strengths highlighted in the report were, "pervasive monitoring and diagnostics across networks, systems and applications," and "well established capabilities to assimilate infrastructure-related topologies and performance information from a wide variety of third-party sources."

OPNET's CEO, Marc Cohen, stated, "We are pleased to receive recognition from EMA that validates our approach to Application Performance Management. Our recent entry into application dependency mapping, based on a dynamic run-time solution, provides OPNET with a significant competitive differentiator. We are leveraging the rich forensic and performance data produced by the rest of our APM suite to solve a long standing problem in IT, which is accurate discovery of an application's footprint."