A licensing agreement announced last month between Hewlett-Packard Co. and RiverSoft Technologies Ltd. will improve network management capabilities for users of HP's Network Node Manager for its OpenView enterprise management system, analysts said.
HP will license source code for San Francisco-based RiverSoft's network management operating system (NMOS). It will also join San Jose-based Cisco Systems Inc., a 6% shareholder, as a minority investor. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
RiverSoft's NMOS is "one of the most sophisticated physical modeling programs," said Dennis Drogseth, an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates Inc. in Boulder, Colo.
The program automatically models and monitors topology, configuration and component-change management, greatly speeding network problem resolution, Drogseth said.
"It's been a sore point for network managers that they can't finish polling every device before it's time to start again," said Patrick Dryden, an analyst at Illuminata Inc. in Nashua, N.H. The NMOS addition would speed that process, he said.
The RiverSoft technology might as well be stamped "destination Network Node Manager," said Valerie O'Connell, an analyst at Aberdeen Group Inc. in Boston. "[It] would instantly bring much-needed Layer 2 discovery and mapping capability to Network Node Manager."
The agreement came two weeks after HP announced that it would acquire Bluestone Software Inc., a Web server and application developer in Philadelphia.
With Bluestone bolstering HP's WebQOS Web server and application manager and RiverSoft extending Network Node Manager, the two agreements constitute "a one-two punch," offering users "a step up in service-level management," said Jonathan Eunice, Illuminata's president.