Is the latest cat video that’s gone viral on YouTube clogging your customer’s network? Got more than a few employees listening to their own private radio stations on Pandora? A new survey of managed service providers reveals that more than half of them spend 13 percent of their time troubleshooting sluggish networks—sluggishness that can be caused by employee use of these high-bandwidth Internet applications.

The survey, released by PacketTrap Networks, a network traffic analysis software vendor, identifies the top five pain points for managed service providers.  

The top problem? Lack of visibility into network traffic. A full 75 percent of the 258 managed service providers who responded to the e-mail survey said that they need better granular traffic analysis software, according to the company.

Other top pain points included the following, in ranked order:

2. moving assets to the cloud
3. too many applications to manage
4. managing/monitoring laptop fleets
5. server management

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PacketTrap, which has sold its network troubleshooting software to enterprise IT organizations for the last three years, is now looking to broaden its markets and has created a product designed for managed service providers.

Released about five months ago, PacketTrap for MSPs manages traffic and bandwidth from multiple network sources, including MSP NOCs (network operation centers), Amazon’s or other public clouds, or onsite, PacketTrap CEO Steve Goodman tells Channel Insider.

And PacketTrap is not the only vendor going after this growing market.

WAN optimization vendor Blue Coat, which last year acquired PacketShaper from Packeteer, is also pursuing the network analysis and optimization over the WAN market with a 100 percent channel, two-tier program sold into larger enterprises.

The company recently rolled out a new version of its product, PacketShaper 8.5, which focuses on the visibility of the application delivery network, executives at the company tell Channel Insider.

Blue Coat combined its own channel program with Packeteer’s program in December, creating the Advantage Program for channel partners. Blue Coat is putting much of its investment in the new program around deal registration, offering a 20 percent deal registration discount plus a 20 percent up-front discount. The company offers three classes for partners: Authorized, Premier and Elite.

The product supports VMware’s virtual desktop initiative, and Blue Coat has invested in wrapping all the functionality into a single integrated workspace where customers can see everything going on in the network and take corrective action through integrated policies.

For example, customers can set a policy that limits the amount of bandwidth dedicated to a particular link, and then they can see the effect that policy has on the rest of network traffic. Jim Harold, vice president of worldwide channel sales for Blue Coat, points to one customer in Africa who discovered that 70 percent of this network traffic was going to Facebook.

To help support the channel, Blue Coat is offering a program called Blue Box, a low-cost demonstration model that allows them to leave the product with the customer. Partners are also trained on network assessment.

As for PacketTrap’s MSP product, CEO Goodman says that the MSP portion of the business is growing faster than the enterprise business.

“Our growth business is the MSP business,” says Goodman. “Hundreds of partners are signed up with us, and we’ve only released five months ago.”

PacketTrap supports virtualization, remote control, patch management, help desk and ticketing. Plus they get a real-time dashboard into customer traffic.

PacketTrap offers its downloadable software to MSPs that can be installed at their NOCs. MSPs can then install an agent or many agents at each customer location.

The technology is also available in a pure-play SAAS (software as a service) model, allowing MSPs to monitor customer networks from the PacketTrap NOC. The price of both models is essentially the same to MSPs.

SAAS partners pay on a monthly basis, and there is no upfront cost or cancellation fee. An average channel partner using the SAAS service or using the downloaded version pays about $1,000 month, says Goodman, but some pay much less.