Corporate network watcher
Stephen Ballantyne
You know how it is with overnight successes ? they usually turn out to have been the result of years of unspectacular work in the background. And so it is with IPClarity.

Chief executive Wayne Toddun says Hash Valabh, the company's chief scientist, has been specialising in networks and network analysis for about 12 years.

"Over that time he studied what others were doing, and realised there must be a better way of doing these things. Five years ago he founded Performance Reporting Systems but we changed the name to IPClarity when I became involved with the business."

What Mr Valabh was studying was the installation and maintenance of corporate networks. "We were selling performance reporting services to large integrators who needed to provide performance reporting for their customers ?we were a service, whereas IPClarity is a product," he says.

"With our solution you don't have to install complex software and hardware," Mr Toddun says.

"We remove all the complexity. We put one of our DataSinks on the customer's network" ?Mr Toddun indicates a beige box that looks very much like a PC without a monitor or keyboard ?" and it communicates with all the other devices on the customer's network, analyses the network topology, encrypts and co mpresses the information and sends it back to us. We then use the information to generate reports which we publish to our customers over the internet."

Reports are generated either in HTML for immediate inspection in a browser or as PDF documents for long-term reference and archiving.

The scope of the IPClarity product is comprehensive ?the generated reports cover all activity that may take place on a corporate network: "all your ethernet ports, whether connected to a PC or a printer, all your routers, your connection to the internet and to other external networks and servers, and any devices enabling communication between branches ?the works.

"Interestingly, although it was initially developed to be a reporting product, we're actually finding that our beta trial organisations are using it to replace network management tools," Mr Toddun says. "They're finding that we can manage their networks much more cheaply than they can do it themselves."

The system is still being tweaked, with the help of some large but anonymous trial sites.

Nevertheless the demonstrated output from IPClarity's browser-based reporting software is impressive: identifying nodes on a network that are behaving abnormally can maximise the network's performance ?which is the dry engineering way of saying that IPClarity can find out why the accounting department's connections always seem to be much slower than those in sales, or vice versa.

Behind a lagging node there are mundane physical realities such as defective cabling or an ethernet card near the end of its working life, while a spike in node usage may indicate that the person sitting at the computer connected to that node is spending more time browsing the web for sports results than is compatible with efficient work performance.

Inevitably the benefits of IPClarity's product will be strongest for medium to large businesses, since they are more likely to have networks complex enough to benefit from continuous monitoring and management.

"But we can be of benefit to small businesses," Mr Toddun says, "particularly with our threshold reporting functions to keep an eye on DSL traffic. The hardware is $80 a month and for a company with six branches we'd charge $50 a router and $25 a switch.

"Configuration is completely automatic, with the DataSink performing full auto discovery of other devices. So our cost isn't great and well within the range of even quite small businesses.

"When we explain the benefits for reporting and fault management and that we can do all this without our customer having to hire additional staff, we usually find they're keen to take us on board.

"All the same, we do appeal more to larger businesses than are the norm in New Zealand, so we intend to go international with this. Once we've got things kicked off here we'll be taking it to Australia and the US."

It's too early to say whether IPClarity will be an overnight success. There's still a lot of toiling going on behind the scenes in IPClarity's offices, with a fair amount of manual intervention still required for the company to keep its customers satisfied.

Nevertheless, the product is ready to go now and the path to a completely refined, more automated business is well defined.

As it stands, IPClarity's reporting software is a model of user accessibility and its hardware plainly works.

Already the company has a major reseller deal set up with ISP Iconz, which is offering the product to its customers.

Mr Toddun hopes that eventually the other New Zealand ISPs will also offer IPClarity to their customers ?and after that it's the world.

IMAGE: REMOVING COMPLEXITY -- IPClarity's Wayne Toddun (left) and Iconz marketing manager Matthew Sollis at the signing of a reseller deal