Enterprise Management Associates has been tracking network change and configuration management, or NCCM, for several years now. The better products now do far more than just change and configuration, though - they directly support issues of policy and compliance, service provisioning, service assurance and in some cases operational automation.

The leading vendors in this market - such as AlterPoint, Intelliden, Opsware (with its acquisition of Rendition) and Voyence - have all withstood several years of tough competition and all provide good products with strong R&D and impressive return on investment.

Today I’d like to focus on Intelliden, which has evolved from the OSS environment to support government and enterprise customers with rich capabilities for operational automation and powerful, in-depth device modeling. Last year, Intelliden acquired Goldwire Technologies, which brings strengths in security and access control. Intelliden’s R-Series can give IT buyers with complex networks a leg up well beyond automating change, to enhance processes for better operational efficiencies and enforce policies to support both security and business-alignment priorities. Because of the multi-dimensional nature of the offering, Intelliden uses the term “Associative Networking” to position R-Series.
 
Associative Networking is a statement about the interrelationships among the networked infrastructure, the services it supports, the customers of those services, and the various professionals and organizations that make up both IT or OSS and counterparts in business operations. Associative Networking is a software-centric approach to encapsulating these interdependencies with high levels of reliability and automation.

Intelliden does this primarily by combining three core technologies: object-based modeling, support for policies, and workflow capabilities. Of these, the object modeling reflects the most profound investment in the R-Series products. The goal of object modeling is to capture human expertise directly in software through “model-based automation.” Intelliden develops its modeling by parsing the command syntax of a device, and then the device commands into XML.

In this way, Intelliden captures the command structure of the device, and through a mixture of class types and associations the R-Series can relate device commands with configuration options for vendor, type, model and operating system. Intelliden supports a variety of network- and security-related devices, including but not limited to those from 3Com, Alcatel, Avaya, CheckPoint, Cisco, Dell, Enterasys, Extreme, Foundry, F5, HP, Juniper, Lucent and Nortel.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.