The emergence of the World Wide Web has brought the Internet protocol suite into the mainstream. The explosion of users is increasing the demand for not just HTTP but all Internet protocols. It is also fueling an increase in ISPs -- we are seeing not just more and larger ISPs, but also a large number of inexperienced ISPs as well. These ISPs need to know how well their resources are being used, for cost controls, site and network planning, etc.
With the Web heralding the coming of electronic commerce, we are seeing calls for demographic and psychographic information. In addition to the more obvious "hit" rates on web servers, transaction analysis is being used for determining content, providing individualized services, and even for setting on-line advertising rates.
Traditional tools have either presented reams of data or mostly content-free graphs and charts. They have not produced significant information by which ISPs (and network managers, webmasters, etc) can know the makeup of the network traffic, how it compares with traffic seen by other sites, how the traffic has changed over time, and how it impacts their resources.
Company XXX (actually there is no name yet) was formed January 96 as a vendor of multi-level network analysis tools, with initial focus on high-level web-centric information, including data aggregation and real-time reporting of sessions, as opposed to lower-level packet statistics.