The speaker, Victor Kirchenstein, introduced NetXMS, a network monitoring system, and its design principles, emphasizing its speed, flexibility, extensibility, and suitability for large setups. The system has features such as automatic network topology discovery, topology-based event correlation, powerful functions for event processing, data collection from different sources, built-in scripting language, and flexible access control. Kirchenstein also described several use cases of NetXMS, including monitoring a global company with more than 12,000 network devices, an agricultural holding in South Africa, and an industrial computing consulting company in the US.