Network Engines (NEI)

[blueskywaves]

Network Engines Announces Availability of Ipsum Networks Server Appliance Solution
Wednesday June 4, 8:45 am ET

Route Dynamics(TM) Product Suite is the First Automated Root Cause Analysis Tool for IP Routed Networks

CANTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 4, 2003-- Network Engines today announced availability of a server appliance offered by Ipsum Networks that identifies the root cause of Layer 3 problems across enterprise networks and monitors the impact on application flow path availability. Engineered and manufactured by Network Engines, a leading development, manufacturing and distribution partner for storage and security software and equipment providers, and sold by Ipsum Networks, the Route Dynamics product suite is the first server appliance solution to deliver real-time automated root cause analysis of complex and costly IP routing faults.

The Route Dynamics appliance is a stand-alone unit that can be installed quickly and easily into an enterprise environment to improve availability of network resources. The appliance puts automated fault and root cause capabilities into the hands of network technicians, allowing rapid resolution of IP routing faults and ensuring higher application and service availability....

http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/030604/45341_1.html


Funding pushes Ipsum onto $2B market track
Peter Key, Staff Writer
Week of 5/5/2003

A company co-founded by a University of Pennsylvania professor has received $6 million in venture funding to market software for detecting hard-to-spot computer network problems.

The second-round financing of Ipsum Networks Inc., which is based in Philadelphia's Old City, was led by Rho Ventures of New York. Sevin Rosen Funds, which has offices in Dallas and Palo Alto, Calif., also participated in the funding. Sevin Rosen provided Ipsum with an initial funding of $1.5 million in August 2001.

"We were able to demonstrate [to the venture funders] that we had not only developed a sort of innovative technology, but that we had gotten pretty good traction with several customers, that we were filling a real need," said Roch Guerin, Ipsum's chief executive officer, who is on leave from his duties as Penn's Alfred Fitler Moore professor of telecommunications networks.

The need exists among organizations that operate computer networks that use Internet Protocol, or IP, as a means of data transmission.

In those types of networks, computers transmit data by breaking it up into packets, addressing each packet and sending the packet on its way. Once on its way, the packet encounters a machine called a router. The router looks at the address on the packet and, based on information it shares with other routers, ships the packet to another machine that it thinks is on the way to the packet's ultimate destination. Eventually, the routers in the network get the packet to its destination, where it and its brother packets are reassembled.

The strength of an IP network is that it doesn't depend on a central computer or computers to work. In fact, IP was designed so that the United States could create computer networks that weren't dependent on a central machine or group of machines, and thus were tough to destroy.

The weakness of an IP network is that its smooth functioning depends on the accuracy of the information the routers pass among themselves. If they start passing inaccurate information, data flow through the network can be slowed or altogether stopped.

Without a way of monitoring the communication among routers on a network, however, it's impossible to spot inaccuracies until the inaccurate communication starts affecting the network's performance. Also, finding the source of the inaccurate communication can be quite difficult.

"Things that happen at one end of the network ripple and propagate and create changes everywhere that are very hard to track," Guerin said.

That means a problem caused by bad communications among routers on an IP network can take a while to solve.

That was OK when IP networks weren't widely used. In recent years, however, their use has been growing among such organizations as brokerages, which can lose millions of dollars each second one of their networks is down. As a result, the demand for something that can spot communications problems in an IP network before they damage the network also has been growing.

Guerin and Raju Rajan, with whom he worked at IBM Corp. in the 1990s, formed Ipsum to satisfy that demand.

"We both felt, Raju and myself, that there was an opportunity and that there was nothing to fill that hole and that we had a pretty good idea, based on all our experience in the networking sort of world, how to develop a novel solution," Guerin said.

Guerin and Rajan, who is Ipsum's chief technology officer, pitched their idea to venture capitalists. After they received seed funding from Sevin Rosen, they founded Ipsum and began trying to turn their idea into software. (They got the name for their company from nosce te ipsum, a Latin phrase meaning, "know thyself.")

Ipsum had its first version of the software, which it calls Route Dynamics, ready for internal testing last July. It has been testing the software, which it sells on server computers made by Network Engines Inc. of Canton, Mass., at customer sites the past few months, and was planning to make the software/server combinations generally available about now.

Route Dynamics works by monitoring two types of communications -- those happening among routers within a network and the communications that the network is sending to and receiving from other networks. That enables it to tell users what's going on in the system to which it's attached and the systems to which that system links at a level that is pretty much invisible to other network-monitoring equipment.

"Plug it in and it automatically discovers everything in all available [data] paths and application flows through your network," said Frank Hayes, Ipsum's vice president for marketing and business development.

Route Dynamics allows users to perform simulations so they can see what will happen to their network if they make any kind of change in it. It also enables them to perform differential analysis, which can be used to compare the condition of a network before a piece of equipment is installed to the condition of the network after installation. That enables them to spot if the equipment was incorrectly programmed, so they can fix it.

Route Dynamics isn't a cheap product. Hayes said the smallest server running it costs about $50,000.

The customers Ipsum is targeting consist of companies here and abroad of Fortune 1000 size.

The core computer systems at those kinds of companies usually don't use IP, according to Charles Phipps, a general partner at Sevin Rosen's Dallas office. Instead, its use is confined to what Phipps called those companies' "edge systems."

Still, there are enough of those so that Ipsum is forecasting a $2 billion market for Route Dynamics by 2006.

Additionally, "there is tremendous migration toward IP," said Dennis Drogseth, a vice president at the Portsmouth, N.H., office of Enterprise Management Associates Inc., a Boulder, Colo.-based tech consulting firm.

As a result, Drogseth thinks the market for Route Dynamics could see exponential growth, which the product is well-positioned to exploit.

"It has a good future in my view," he said. "There's not a lot of other products out there like it."

Peter Key can be reached at [e-mail]
http://philadelphia.bizjournals.com/philadelphia/stories/2003/05/05/story4.html