Saisei

Enterprise networks are overburdened with the traffic growth driven by Over the Top Traffic (OTT), exponential growth in Unified Communications, and continued migration of business applications to the cloud. This is further compounded by the growth in short bursts of traffic driven by IoT devices. All these factors have made it imperative for enterprises to effectively manage their networks through advanced network classification and enforcement. Saisei, a Sunnyvale-based networking company is addressing this need by providing a cutting-edge unified solution for visibility, analytics, and enforcement (bandwidth control) which is transparent to network operators from a network design and operations standpoint. This allows enterprises and service providers to use their full network bandwidth which directly results in dramatic savings, accelerated revenue growth, and enhanced user experience.

Saisei network enforcement dramatically improves network performance and user experience while enabling network operators to run their links at very high utilization. This means the most TCP/IP networks that were typically running in 60 percent utilization can run at greater than 90 percent utilization without an impact on user experience, thereby ensuring that the network is optimized for any amount of traffic. “Saisei holds four network enforcement patents. This means that our methods are unique, revolutionary and specifically designed for optimal performance,” says Julia Sartini, CEO at Saisei.

Saisei’s out-of-the-box configurations give immediate insights and benefits. It also aids enterprises to take a deep dive into intelligent reporting, and advanced configurations and optimization.

A combination of these deep analytical insights with machine learning capabilities helps enterprises with continued network assessment and improvement. Additionally, Saisei helps enterprises manage OTT traffic for optimal UX, set conditional rules and alarms for real-time correction of issues, have dynamic bandwidth management and key application assurance, augment security, reduce bandwidth and tech support costs, ensure fair management of all users and applications, and integrate directly with active directory to apply policies by groups or departments.

Their software is truly real-time in the sense that it does not rely on sampled network data but reports on every single flow of data. This ensures that Saisei can react instantly to any of the millions of analytics data point that it collects and processes in real time with over 40 predefined metrics. These can then be leveraged to identify user experience issues based on application, geolocation, and users. The software helps reduce customer management and technical support overheads.

One of the key differentiating factors of Saisei is that it is a software-based solution with no attachment to any hardware manufacturer. This allows the software to be run on commodity hardware or in a virtual environment. Additionally, they also provide full Rest API support for simplified integrations to third-party OSS/BSS.

Sartini recounts an instance where Saisei was able to help NHN Entertainment, the third largest game company in Korea. Some of their applications, such as the ones used in overseas countries, were not meeting performance standards. They risked losing clients and were developing a reputation for below-par gaming experiences which put their place in the industry in jeopardy. Saisei came into the picture at this point and deployed their real-time FlowCommand software-based network performance enforcement (NPE) tool. This gave NHN visibility into all traffic flows and helped them tune capacity to retain performance levels. Additionally, it also helped them detect and mitigate DDOS attacks to obtain optimum performance.

Sartini envisions increasing the software’s machine learning capabilities to identify and improve user experience related issues. They also look to continue their focus on augmenting security, particularly around DDOS identification and mitigation. Network automation, simplified integration, and network discovery form the other aspects of the company’s roadmap while looking at the future.