NetFlow Optimizer (NFO) is a software-only processing engine for network flow data: NetFlow, IPFIX, sFlow, J-Flow, Cloud Flow Logs (AWS VPC, Microsoft Azure, Google VPC), etc. NFO is not a NetFlow collector. It uses patented streaming technology that accepts network flow data from network devices cloud flow logs (routers, switches, firewalls, virtual networks), applies map-reduce algorithms to the data to address desired use cases, converts the processed data to syslog (or other formats such as JSON), then sends that information to your visualization platform or SIEM.