Insurance giant taps start-up to manage domain names

REDWOOD CITY, CALIF. - Nominum, a 3-year-old start-up specializing in Internet name and addressing technologies, last week announced its first enterprise software licensing deal.

Nominum will provide German insurance giant Allianz Group with its new Foundation IP Address Suite, which includes software for tracking and managing large blocks of IP addresses. Nominum officials say the deal is worth several hundred thousand dollars and includes software to manage more than 500,000 IP addresses for Allianz, which operates in 70 countries and has more than 60 million clients of its financial services.

Nominum's Foundation IP Address Suite includes a database system for tracking IP address allocation, Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server software, DNS server software and caching name server software. The suite starts at $150,000.

Nominum's Foundation IP Address Suite competes against software packages from Lucent and Cisco. However, Nominum officials say that most large companies have not purchased software to manage their IP address space and instead use Excel spreadsheets to track assignments.

"We talked to one company that had a rogue device on its network, and all the engineers had was an IP address," says Richard Probst, vice president of product marketing at Nominum. "It took the company two weeks to figure out where that IP address was located geographically and whose responsibility it was. With the Foundation suite, you can answer that question in minutes."

The Foundation IP Address Suite is available for Solaris, Linux and Free BSD operating systems. It uses relational database software from Oracle or open source Postgres to store up-to-date information about IP address allocations. It has an automatic discovery process that extracts information from the company's DHCP and DNS servers to populate its database. For each IP address, the database tracks where it is located on a network, the corresponding domain name, who is responsible for it and what DNS and print servers it uses. The IP address allocation information is available to network managers around the company via a Web-based interface.

The Foundation IP Address Suite works with Nominum's own DNS server software or the popular open-source Berkeley Internet Name Domain software. Nominum's suite supports IPv4 and IPv6 addresses and internationalized domain names.

"A lot of companies realize that they're sitting on top of networks that have grown chaotically, are not well-managed and are at risk," Probst says. "A network can go down because an IP address is not being managed appropriately."

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