Pitching next-generation network management
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By Mark Songini
The small network monitoring and management software company has gone from
birth to winning a Best of Show award at NetWorld+Interop 97 in Atlanta -
all within 12 months. NextPoint claims its key to success is keeping its product, dubbed
NextPoint S3 (for Street Savvy Software), focused on business functions and
not on bells and whistles.
NextPoint says its management software focuses on customers' business
objectives. This is done by tying network and application service levels
directly to a department's business operations. For example, the software
would make sure an accounting department was able to close its books on
time by preventing a network bottleneck that would make an accounts
receivable application unavailable.
The product performs network diagnoses as well as fault and performance
control to improve reliability and availability. The software includes
technology called Traffic Signatures that can pinpoint historical patterns
in network traffic that result from certain business applications, or
perhaps, shifts in employee work habits. S3 also includes Synthetic
Transactions, technology that lets companies simulate the impact network
applications would have on a network. The company was founded a year ago by Bill Maro, the company's president
and CEO, and two other Digital Equipment Corp. veterans. The three Digital
alums knew each other and compared notes. They wanted to become
entrepreneurs. They decided to concentrate on network management and to
make their product "business-centric," as they like to call it. "There was a crying need in the marketplace to manage routers and switches
more effectively," Maro says. Most existing management tools treat network
devices as devices, not as service delivery products, he says.
NextPoint S3 contains Windows NT-based server software, with information
collecting agents that reside on NT and Solaris workstations and servers as
well as on network communications devices. NextPoint S3 also can analyze
data garnered by SNMP and Remote Monitoring agents. Information is gathered
and pushed to appropriate users, workers in accounts receivable,
manufacturing, ordering and others. IS managersalso get tipped off in case
of an impending crash in the system. The information is presented to the
parties via a Java interface.
"We help identify bottlenecks so that proactive steps can be taken," Maro
says. The software identifies normal operating conditions for a network,
then uses the statistics as a benchmark to detect malfunctions. "We take a
fingerprint of the network and see how it really operates, and then we set
up automatic alarms and thresholds," he says. The company is targeting midsize to large companies and is prepared to
begin volume shipments in 1998.
Maro figures the company will need to team with world-class partners to
assist in marketing the product and to help distinguish the software from
the many other management tools on the market.
Network World, 12/29/97
