Today, I was talking to one of Netcordia's university customers in the state of Texas. They have over 40 merchants and store fronts on campus allowing students and others to pay by credit card. And they've started to get audited at least once per year for PCI DSS compliance, as they have obligation...

I had the privilege of reviewing a neat paper, Network Topology Discovery , by Eric Siegel, a technical analyst at the Burton Group. His paper covers a many aspects of network topology discovery in 30 pages, sprinkled with details on how things work. I found it to be a very well written paper, covering...

I've written here (and in our Forum) about visualization and why a lot of visualization isn't very useful. An interesting parallel concept is that of auralization, which is to sound what visualization is to sight. William W. Gayer at Apple developed a neat application he called SonicFinder that...

With all the existing network management products on the market, what was the motivation for creating NetMRI? I found in my consulting work that people often had a lot of products, but that they didn’t regularly use them (yes, there are exceptions). The existing systems were difficult to use, weren’t...

I visited a customer yesterday who is using eight (!) tools for network management (this count includes NetMRI). It wasn’t much of a surprise to find out that they are using only a fraction of each product, often only one specific function. One product was used for displaying a map with red/green icons...