As networks become more complex to test and monitor, small to midsized enterprises can expect help and support from new companies, new standards, and new tools from known companies. These network management systems are the wave of the future.

Although the company has been around for 12 years, AdventNet (www.adventnet.com) has enough experience in individual management areas that it has now put together a comprehensive network management system for SMEs.

AdventNet’s ManageEngine grew out of a range of niche products that are now coming together under a common architecture—a portfolio that includes help desk, service management, and desktop management, notes Dennis Drogseth, vice president of Enterprise Management Associates (www.enterprisemanagement.com), a New Hampshire-based consultancy.

“Our idea is to be the leader in low-cost enterprise management solutions,” says Girish Mathrubootham, vice president for the ManageEngine line. He says the company’s goal is to be the network management system equivalent of Wal-Mart, Southwest Airlines, or IKEA.

“The big players have everything an SME could want. But it is not affordable,” Mathrubootham says. While AdventNet has some Fortune 1000 customers, he says 80% of its buyers are SMEs. Typically, the SMEs purchased a vendor solution but could not use it to full advantage. They may have tried a standalone network management system, but it was not complete enough.

In fact, AdventNet started its life OEMing product to vendors such as Nortel (www.nortel.com). Today, its ManageEngine is a network management system suite that combines the many individual elements the company developed over several years. "We built independent products, each competing in its own market as credible products," Mathrubootham says. The three newest modules are OpUtils, a system and network monitoring tool; EventLog Analyzer, for event management; and Firewall Analyzer.

The company’s integrated solution is still growing. The system automates alerts and trouble ticketing, for example, eliminating the manual steps required to prioritize and assign trouble tickets.

Look for a desktop, networking, and IT management solution soon. The latter is in the final engineering stages and should be available by Q3. The others will follow later this year or next year.

"We provide a clever way of allowing people to model their network applications," says John Humphreys, managing director at Tail-f Systems (www.tail-f.com). “Our sole purpose for being is to provide network management software.”

The company, founded in 2005, provides software that allows companies to avoid having to write software from scratch while still being able to customize their own applications.

Tail-f, headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, with a U.S. presence, offers an accessible product that brings the NETCONF protocol to the enterprise. NETCONF is the IETF standard (RFCs 4741 and 4742) that defines the interface that lets management applications automate configuration of network elements. It allows a computer to talk to a device like a router. This transaction management merges multiple configuration changes into a single transaction, Humphreys explains. “We provide an alternative to companies that, rather than have to assign software engineers to a task, would like to have a jumpstart on the project. Then, they can add internal bells and whistles,” he says.

“Our approach is to model all these devices (routers, gateways, switches) in XML,” Humphreys adds. “We treat all management interfaces in a consistent way. We can auto-render all the management interfaces.” This assures IT that all changes are made consistently before they are finally committed. Humphreys notes that most errors happen due either to human error or to a script that is not updated. Tail-f’s product avoids both situations. The upshot is fewer misconfiguration errors and less hassle with upset users or broader network outages.

Tail-f calls the system for element management ConfM. For network equipment it has Instant NETCONF Agent. Both complement Tail-f’s existing ConfD software family of NETCONF solutions.