Your assessment that enterprise brands are letting politics interfere with effective integration of network management capabilities is spot on. But as the vendor of the only open network automation solution, and one of the few remaining independent network solutions providers, we believe the root of the problem has even more to do with the challenge all management vendors face when attempting to keep pace with the rapid innovation taking place in our industry.

Innovation in the areas of unified security, network optimization and application acceleration has resulted in an explosion of new technologies, specialty devices and vendors. The proliferation of high-speed connectivity networks and logical overlay networks -- all running over the same physical links -- has made it all but impossible for network teams to maintain consistent security, access, audit and change control using manual processes and device-specific management tools. There has never been a greater need for a unified network management platform. But as the number of equipment vendors in a typical enterprise network has increased from just a handful to over 20 or more, management vendors have not kept pace and in some cases because of competitive politics, and in others because it is a daunting task for any single vendor. This situation has led to the explosion of non-logical, opportunistic and sometimes tactical point management solutions that you describe, as well as a least-common-denominator management capability that causes network management teams to revert to native element management systems for all but the most basic operations.

At AlterPoint, we believe that the best solution will be achieved when network equipment vendors, management software vendors and network management teams work together to promote open manageability and interoperability of multi-vendor networks. This kind of cooperation used to occur only through industry standards bodies. With open source, this can now happen at the code level. That is exactly what we're achieving with the formation of the ZipTie Open Network Alliance (ZONA), a community of like-minded technology vendors including Citrix, Force10, Juniper, Radware, Riverbed and Vyatta, among others. AlterPoint has also taken the step of offering a standard for network inventory frameworks by contributing the framework from our own commercial product to the ZipTie open source project (ZipTie.org). In addition, we contributed to the development of a number of tools that enable the ZipTie community and ZONA members to download, develop and share scripts, change templates, rules, policies, device adapters, plug-ins and best practices. These network management components are housed at ZipForge.org the industry's first-ever network management exchange.

By embracing an open and collaborative approach to software development, and taking the lead in driving the Open Network Management Initiative, AlterPoint is creating value for our own customers as well as the networking industry at-large. Opens source approaches provide a win-win-win situation for network management teams, network equipment providers, and management software vendors - and a step in the direction of more integrated and unified network management.

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