Bermuda firms have taken advantage of expertise offered by Network General Corporation, a hugely successful US firm that designs, manufactures and sells software-based local area network (LAN) and wide area network (WAN) analysis tools.

The industry and technology leader in network analysis, Network General helps clients find problems and installs products that they create to tell them what is wrong with their network.

Through an association with Pitts Bay Road company, Computer Cabling Systems Ltd. (CCS), Network General has held classes at the Princess Hotel this week.

"The nine year old company is a worldwide leader in providing fault and performance management solutions for enterprise networks, drawing on an extensive experience in complex heterogeneous network environments. The company has a fleet of technologies, products and services designed to provide extensive visibility into the network or equipment,'' territory manager Ms Sue Lin Lange said.

"We are here teaching a course for the first time, called "Sniffer University'', which is a series of technical courses that allows technical network people to become certified network experts (CNX), an industry certification.'' Several large companies here have been taking advantage of the course because it will place a network analyst, with the proper diagnostic tools, among their existing staff.

For more than a year, Network General have helped Computer Cabling Systems Ltd. to purchase products that would monitor their networks.

"It means that they can be alerted to trouble before it happens instead of having the network go down and then trying to trouble shoot. A lot of the firms who we help just can't afford to have their networks go down unexpectedly,'' said Ms Lange.

"It doesn't matter how big the company's network is. With a critical network it's important to be able to see the problem before it affects everyone on the network and then resolve it. We give total network visibility.'' CCS have used Network General products for emergency services to customers, but they also provide the product directly to the company that will remotely monitor the customer's network 24 hours a day.