Today marks another chapter in the continuing development of the network visibility solutions industry as Gigamon conducted its initial public offering.

The news shines a spotlight on network visibility’s astronomical growth, and helps raise awareness of the real and costly problems we are solving for our customers.

Wi-Fi-enabled medical devices continue to grow in both number and complexity while the use model for mobility evolves. Healthcare facility Wireless LANs (WLANs) once consisted mainly of laptops on carts stationed outside patient rooms and infusion pumps that operated as standalone devices. The onset of VoIP added a layer of complexity, but it was not until recently that Wi-Fi deployments scaled to include hundreds of highly mobile critical-care devices moving with patients throughout facilities.

Complexity, like inflation, is a given in the modern world. Sometimes it may slow to crawl, but it never stops permanently. For data networks, complexity never seems to take a rest at all. The rate of increase of this complexity has been characterized by David Cappuccio at Gartner, who stated in a Gartner Symposium in late 2012 that for every 25% increase in functionality of a system, there is a 100% increase in complexity. See the blog that Eric Savitz at Forbes wrote about that symposium.