AlterPoint Achieves Key Milestones in Open Network Management Initiative: NetworkAuthority "Mako" Release and ZipForge Network Management Ex

AUSTIN, Texas (Business Wire EON) January 29, 2008 -- The last five years have seen an explosion of new technologies and a proliferation of high-speed connectivity and logical overlay networks. As the number of new device types and network services has continued to grow, vendors of network management software have struggled to provide comprehensive support. This has forced network teams to revert to native element management systems (EMS's) for all but the most basic management operations - in effect, inflating network costs and exposing companies to significant security risks.

"Vendors of network management software have long struggled to support the deep, domain-specific details of growing numbers of devices, resulting in a 'least-common-denominator' approach to network management," said Scott Harmon, CEO of AlterPoint. "We are turning this model on its head, leveraging the resources of a vibrant open source community to remove the barriers to implementation of new network technologies, and to deliver on the vision of open network management."

Highlights and accomplishments of AlterPoint's Open Network Management Initiative include:

-- Launch of ZipForge (http://forge.ziptie.org) - the industry's first-ever network management exchange where members of the ZipTie community and ZipTie Open Network Alliance (ZONA) can download, develop and share scripts, change templates, rules, policies, adaptors, plug-ins and best practices. ZONA members currently include network equipment providers Citrix, Force10, Juniper, Radware, Riverbed and Vyatta, among others.

-- Growing Open-Source Community - more than 1,200 users joined the ZipTie community in Q4 2007, bringing total ZipTie membership to 6,200.

-- Release of the ZipTie Development Environment (ZDE) - enables the open source community to create, edit and extend adapters, scripts and plug-ins that can be used with ZipTie, NetworkAuthority and other management environments that adopt the ZipTie framework.

-- "Mako" Release of NetworkAuthority - features an open, extensible architecture that leverages ZipTie as the foundation of the NetworkAuthority CMDB, allowing Network Authority users to easily download and "drop in" device adapters, scripts, change templates and other content developed by the ZipTie community.

-- Commercial Support of ZipTie and ZipForge Community Components - AlterPoint now offers professional services for enterprises seeking support for ZipTie, as well as community-supplied management components.

"We prefer an open management approach because it allows more people to develop adaptors and tools that support new networking technologies," said Charles Spurgeon, senior network architect at the University of Texas at Austin. "This lessens our dependency on any one vendor's in-house development team and increases our ability to introduce new technologies while maintaining centralized management of the entire network."

"Open approaches give IT management platforms a better chance at keeping up with customer needs," said Michael Cote, analyst at RedMonk. "At the same time, they also keep those platforms honest and innovative by avoiding a single-vendor, closed approach to ongoing development. Any IT management effort benefits from taking the open approach to software development and community that's worked well in other areas of the IT industry."

About AlterPoint, Inc.

AlterPoint open network management solutions optimize network spend and better align IT with business imperatives. The world's most respected enterprises rely on AlterPoint to curb hardware over-provisioning, reduce specialized labor, lower the cost of compliance, and improve the availability of network services. AlterPoint's open, comprehensive network CMDB combines operational and business data to automate, analyze and optimize network change, compliance, security and equipment lifecycles. Multiple stakeholders benefit from AlterPoint's customizable analytics and dashboards for impact assessment, faster troubleshooting, compliance scorecards and trend analysis. Founded in 2001, AlterPoint is headquartered in Austin, Texas. For more information, please visit http://www.alterpoint.com.

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