Start-up looking to find faults
Network industry icon leads Premonitia into fault management market.
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ACTON, MASS. - Cracking the crowded and maturing fault management market will be challenging for start-up Premonitia, but the company has a not-so-secret weapon in Chairman Paul Severino that at least will help get its technology noticed.
A network industry icon, Severino launched one-time Cisco router rival Wellfleet Communications in 1986 after starting Ethernet card maker Interlan five years earlier. Since leaving Bay Networks in 1996 (Bay was formed by the merger of Wellfleet and Synoptics in 1994), Severino has kept plugged in to the industry, investing in companies and serving on boards for start-ups such as PhotonEx and Sonus Networks.
Severino discovered Premonitia through his association with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), the Troy, N.Y., school where he earned an electrical engineering degree in 1969 and is now a trustee.
The company started a little more than a year ago, though traces its roots to 1995, when a group of RPI professors working under a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency started looking for shortcomings in network management technology. Their findings convinced Severino to contribute to the company's $3.2 million seed funding and help the professors turn their research into a commercial product.
"Established companies tend not to take new approaches to an existing problem as seriously as a start-up does," Severino says. "The old way is mature. This is the new way . . . That's the point."
The new way, says Premonitia CEO Peter Vicars, is the Network Early Warning System (NEWS), a hardware and software product.
"[Severino] is a technical visionary. It was [Severino] who saw the work being done at RPI and realized its applicability to large enterprise networks," says Vicars, now in the process of helping the company raise $8 million as development continues.
Vicars pledges that NEWS will represent a "disruptive change" to the way faults, such as problems with routers, are managed. Premonitia says its offering will give customers what's missing in current offerings: advance notice of when faults will occur.
Vicars says that although competitors such as Smarts and Concord Communications claim to have "predictive" features, the difference is that Premonitia performs the analysis in real time, rather than depending on historical data. Like Smarts, Premonitia includes a knowledge base of known problems that can be quickly identified, but the company says it also can detect anomalies that are invisible to other tools.
Industry watchers say Premonitia will need something unique to survive in a market full of established companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Micromuse. "The concept of pure fault management is becoming a remnant of the past" and most vendors are working toward products that provide performance management features as well, says Paul Bugala, an analyst at IDC, which includes fault management in a network assurance market it estimates will increase from $1.4 billion in 2001 to $2.2 billion "by 2006.
"The short of it is that it's hard enough for entrenched players, such as HP, Concord and Smarts, to make headway with current customers, so starting out new at this time is asking a lot of the company's sales force," Bugala says.
Although not familiar with Premonitia, Bugala says the company could make a start if its product addresses a niche not yet discovered by current vendors.
"Smarts started out with a simple algorithm and evolved its message to be more than a refiner of other vendors' data," Bugala says.
Severino argues just that. He says Premonitia with its RPI background discovered new algorithms that can determine a router's behavior in ways not yet done.
"We are attacking the problems that the big guys don't see as significant enough to worry about yet," Severino says. "I try to find those spaces where it seems there's not a lot of activity going on and take the risk at introducing a new way of thinking."
Premonitia intends to have NEWS work in conjunction with potential competition such as HP's OpenView and Micromuse's NetCool products, but NEWS also will work independently of other management systems, the company says.
Richard Glasburg, director of data communications for the commonwealth of Massachusetts, says he's not sure there is a niche left for a new company. The HP and Concord customer says the goal for most network administrators is to "proactively tackle the problems and get the tools to do most of it for you.
"What can a new company do that's more meaningful than what a lot of companies are already doing?" he asks. "Hopefully, [Premonitia] understands something that's missing in the industry or it just does fault better than everyone else."
One plus for customers choosing Premonitia products, Vicars says, will be the lack of custom configuration needed when deploying NEWS. Customers will install appliances called Detectors in equipment racks, often remote from the network operations center (NOC). The Detectors will essentially be SNMP collectors that poll network devices, such as switches, routers and servers. Detectors will be standard 1U (1.75-inch) Linux boxes that run Premonitia's Micro-Structure Analysis Software.
Management software, called the NEWS Warning Manager, will run centrally in the NOC to provide a single interface for configuration and reporting of events. The Warning Manager also contains Premonitia's Fault Knowledge Base, from which the specific fault type is identified and network operators are alerted.
Pricing will start at $100,000. Beta testing is scheduled to start this fall.
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