Packeteer (PKTR) got quite a write-up in The Wall Street Journal in a July 30 article on Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), which PKTR does better than anyone in the world. DPI gives the customer unprecedented visibility into what is traveling over their network, letting them decide which packets should take priority, which can be slightly delayed or compressed without any negative impact, and which should be stopped because they are computer worms or viruses.

Paketeer's new iShaper is a "branch office in a box" that offers visibility, compression of data to save buying more hardware (while not compressing voice or video, to maintain quality, and acceleration of critical packets. The competitors are promising equivalent products, but only PKTR really has the goods.

The Journal article title and subhead were: "A Question of Priorities -- Faced with clogged networks, companies and college campuses get more sophisticated about which online material gets in first." Colleges are big users of DPI, because students are heavy users of high-bandwidth services like music, movie and video downloads that clog networks. A Ball State network engineer was quoted as saying: "I can't imagine a university in the United States without some kind of DPI technology in their network. It's just that important."

Rawlings Sporting Goods turned to Packeteer to solve their problem, too. During the 2005 holiday season, they had a barrage of complaints from customers about Internet orders taking too long to go through. Rawlings engineers couldn't figure out the cause of the problem until they tried a DPI demo system from Packeteer. It turned out that employees were eating up bandwidth by watching streaming videos. "The network was the last place I would have thought we had problems," said Richard Truex, network manager for Rawlings.

By deploying the Packeteer system, Rawlings was able to improve the flow of network traffic without having to buy more bandwidth, leading to major cost savings. Packeteer's system allowed Mr. Truex to create rules to guarantee bandwidth for important applications, like customer orders, and squeeze bandwidth for others. During peak business hours, streaming videos are nearly shut off to allow the flow of important data.

Knowing that PKTR has the best products for a serious problem does not guarantee that the stock will go up, though. But now that there are a couple of activist private equity funds involved with PKTR, I think something will happen sooner rather than later.