AlterPoint Fulfills Promise for Open Source Automated Network Configuration Management with ZipTie Release

Business Wire, June 20, 2007

Open Source Commitment Extended with Contribution of Commercially Developed Device Management Adapters

AUSTIN, Texas -- AlterPoint, Inc., a leading provider of network governance software, today announced the 2007.06 release of the ZipTie open source project. This important milestone builds on the network configuration inventory framework from the previous milestones and includes significant input from ZipTie community participants. As enterprise networks have outgrown manual management practices, network administrators are increasingly turning to tools such as ZipTie to automate network configuration management tasks in order to reduce risk and increase performance. ZipTie does this by discovering and maintaining accurate inventory of device configurations, enabling configuration standardization and automating management tasks.

With this release, network administrators and hardware vendors can now use graphical tools to extend ZipTie to any network hardware device -- routers, switches, hubs, firewalls, load balancers, wireless access points, etc. -- from any vendor with minimum development effort. In contrast, most network configuration management tools use proprietary software that only support specific hardware vendors. ZipTie allows its users and AlterPoint customers to create, test and share network device adapters quickly and easily.

In addition, developers can utilize ZipTie's network automation capabilities and existing plug-ins to import existing scripts into a common framework or to build their own network tools. For example, a network administrator can easily integrate a community string modification script with the ZipTie tools plug-in framework, quickly run the script against hundreds of devices and get a detailed status of each change.

AlterPoint Contributes Device Software

AlterPoint will also contribute more than 40 commercially developed device adapters to the ZipTie community, which will provide management for equipment from dozens of different hardware vendors. Included in this contribution will be adapters for equipment from leading network equipment providers such as Cisco, Juniper, F5, Nortel, 3com, Adtran, Enterasys, Nokia, Checkpoint, Extreme, Foundry, HP, Marconi, Lucent, Dell, Riverbed, BlueCoat, and Aruba. This will allow ZipTie to manage an entire enterprise network, regardless of deployed hardware type and brand.

With the new adapter development tools included in this release, equipment vendors or network administrators can freely modify and extend these adapters to provide support for new software and models from these vendors, or to provide support for other device vendors.

In November of 2006, AlterPoint sponsored the ZipTie open source project and contributed code under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) to offer an open framework for multi-vendor network inventory management to help network administrators and engineers, hardware vendors and software developers break free of limited, proprietary hardware element management systems. Since ZipTie was made available, there have been more than 3,300 downloads of the software, which is now being used to manage networks with over 1,000 devices. Three of the ten new tools in ZipTie 2007.06 are based on input from the community, which has posted numerous bugs and suggestions throughout the project's existence.

"In a matter of hours, a network administrator can download this latest release of ZipTie, discover an entire inventory with hundreds of devices and be ready for automated changes," states Kartick Suriamoorthy, ZipTie community manager. "That said, ZipTie is a growing project and we encourage network experts and tools developers to contribute to the community to enrich the project even further."

The latest ZipTie release is available immediately for download on the community site (www.ziptie.org). Highlights of the 2007.06 release of the ZipTie automated network configuration management toolkit include:

-- ZipTie Development Environment
    -- Community members can easily create, deploy and debug adapters
       for any network device
    -- Open device mediation based on XML-configuration normalization
       and Web services
    -- Extensible, Perl-based ZipTie adapters for easy development and
       modification
-- ZipTie Tools Framework
    -- Contributors, customers and community members can build their
       own tools or migrate existing scripts quickly and easily to
       ZipTie
    -- Extremely customizable framework offers flexibility regarding
       device information display and parameter passing
-- ZipTie User Interface
    -- Sophisticated management task scheduling capabilities, job
       monitoring and integrated network tools management
-- Rich, integrated network tools environment rather than the typical
   but unfriendly command line option

About ZipTie

Launched in November of 2006, ZipTie is an open source project designed to advance network management tools and techniques beyond the limitations imposed by proprietary, vendor provided device management. The ZipTie framework for network inventory management expands device coverage for network engineering and operations teams and offers open source network management technology that goes beyond traditional monitoring and performance. Since ZipTie was first made available, there have been more than 3,300 downloads of the software, which is now being used to manage over 1,000 devices. The latest ZipTie release is available for download on the community site at http://www.ziptie.org.