As businesses have come to depend on client-server and distributed enterprise applications, the network infrastructure has become the lifeblood of the company. Business operations demand reliable yet cost-effective networks as network problems result in lost revenue, increased costs, or both.

Solutions have been developed to guarantee and enhance the performance of networks by controlling the traffic they carry. These are known variously as quality of service (QoS), bandwidth management, traffic shaping and, most recently, network performance (NP) solutions.

Equator One's newest addition to its suite of infrastructure management tools, MAX NP, supports the different technologies used to implement network performance solutions on Internet Protocol (IP) networks, banking mostly on the advantages of MAX NP's Hierarchical Credit-based Queuing (HCQ) approach.