The Broncos might not have done so well on Sunday, but Extreme Networks had a good Super Bowl. The networking vendor has rolled out its analytics platform in partnership with the NFL so that it can now comprehensively monitor what fans are doing on wireless networks in enabled stadiums.

Extreme today launched Purview, Extreme's analytics platform which is built into its networking hardware at the ASIC level. In addition to being used by the NFL in four stadiums, two other announced customers includ the University of New Hampshire and Klinkum Darmstady GmbH.

The Purview technology has already been deployed in four NFL stadiums: Gillette (Patriots), Lincoln Financial Field (Eagles), Ford Field (Lions), and Metlife (Giants and Jets). New England Patriots. Philly, Detrit, and Metlife.

Extreme officials are heavily touting the CoreFlow ASIC, which, unlike some merchant silicon solutions can handle greater application flows. Purview supports 20 gigabits per second of throughput and can handle 1 million application flows. Competing merchant-silicon chips only support 4,000 concurrent flows, says Markus Nispel, VP of solutions architecture with Extreme.

The use cases include application monitoring, security monitoring, and policy control.

This is another case of networking vendors diving into the “big data” trend and providing more granular analysis of what's going on in the network. It's part of an explosion of new networking mangement apps, employing analytics tools to gain a deeper knowledge of networking performance and applications. I would expect to see a lot more of this in the near future. In fact, Rayno Report is publishing a report on this later in the week!

For more information, see a more detailed aricle I wrote for CMSWire.