Network packet broker (NPB) technology has been deployed inside of networks for over a decade. Like just about everything else in the IT and networking stack in 2025, AI is now increasingly becoming a key feature. This week, network hardware and testing vendor Keysight Technologies announced an expansion of its Vision series network packet brokers with the debut of new AI Insight Broker features.
To be clear, the expansion is not new hardware, but rather a new capability for the software stack that runs on the company’s Vision packet brokers. The new AI Insight Broker features combine traditional packet brokering capabilities with advanced AI processing to address the growing complexity of network security challenges.
As part of the update, Keysight is enabling its technology partners to run their own AI-driven network intelligence tools directly on Keysight’s packet brokers, with a feature called AppFusion. Keysight can now filter network traffic to detect the presence of AI-based applications.
“We’re just making sure we can find traffic of interest by developing the application signatures that find those applications,” Taran Singh, vice president, product and strategy at Keysight, told Network World. “One of our core tenants is we’re really good at building that kind of technology in our packet broker at line rate.”
The evolution of network packet brokers
Network packet brokers have undergone significant evolution over the past decade.
Singh noted that 10 years ago, packet brokers were something that he had to educate customers about. At the time, the initial focus was security operations centers (SOC), deployed as infrastructure hardware to gain access to anything in the network and then bring that information back to a number of tools.
The technology has matured considerably since then. Over the last five years, Singh said that most of Keysight’s NPB customers are global Fortune 500 organizations that have large network visibility practices. Meaning they deploy a lot of packet brokers with capabilities ranging anywhere from one gigabit networking at the edge, all the way to 100 gigabit.
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Keysight Technologies
Today’s environments are even more demanding, and Keysight recently introduced 400 gigabit packet brokers to accommodate the explosive growth in network traffic. As network speeds have increased, the focus has shifted beyond just providing raw packet data to also extracting valuable metadata.
“The volume of traffic is huge now,” Singh said. “So a lot of our design and product releases are really focused on making sure nothing is missing in the SOC in terms of packet access and that we work both on the packet side and metadata side.”
Understanding Keysight’s AI stack
Keysight’s announcement introduces several interconnected technologies that work together to deliver enhanced security capabilities.
The AI Stack serves as an umbrella framework for AI-related features implemented in Keysight’s packet brokers. Meanwhile, AI Insight Broker refers to the packet brokers with these AI capabilities built-in. The final piece of the puzzle is AppFusion, which represents a separate but complementary capability allowing third-party applications, including AI applications, to run inside their packet brokers.
“We’ve worked to accelerate that stack, and that’s a new capability in the packet broker that kind of speaks to us, leaning on our technology partners that do a lot of network-derived intelligence, even without AI or with AI, to run directly inside our packet broker,” Singh explained.
Looking ahead, Keysight is taking a consultative approach to further developing its AI capabilities, working closely with customers across various sectors.
“We have a lot of lighthouse customers that are experimenting with AI themselves, and not a week goes by when we are not consulted,” Singh said. “The strategy we’re taking is in a consultative approach with our customers in different segments. Finance will have a different requirement than service providers, than the government, than enterprises.”
Source:: Network World