AlterPoint Announces the ZipTie Open Network Alliance.

Network Equipment Providers Citrix Systems, Force10 Networks, Fortinet, Juniper Networks, Radware, Riverbed Technology and Vyatta to Contribute Resources, Best Practices to Open Source Network Management Initiative

AUSTIN, Texas -- AlterPoint, Inc., a leading provider of network governance software, today announced the formation of the ZipTie Open Network Alliance, a community of like-minded technology vendors committed to promoting open manageability and interoperability of multi-vendor networks. Joining AlterPoint in the ZipTie Open Network Alliance are inaugural members Citrix Systems, Force10 Networks, Fortinet, Juniper Networks, Radware, Riverbed Technology and Vyatta.

"As the leader in Linux-based networking, Vyatta feels strongly that users are best served by open solutions that promote interoperability and encourage innovation," said Dave Roberts, vice president of strategy at Vyatta. "As users exercise the option to deploy Vyatta on standalone hardware, blade servers, and inside virtual machines, the content generated through the ZipTie Open Network Alliance will provide the perfect complement to help them manage the resulting network infrastructure."

The first initiative of the ZipTie Open Network Alliance is to leverage ZipTie, the open source project for network management, to provide:

* An open, multi-vendor framework for network inventory management that can be used by any network administrator

* Device-independent tools to discover, back-up and manage configuration details for any IP-networking device, including routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers, VoIP gateways and WAN/application concentrators

* A free public forum for sharing tools, scripts and best practices

Network equipment providers can choose to incorporate elements of the ZipTie project to supplement their own management tools, as well as encourage their customers to use the tools directly from the ZipTie community.

"Proprietary and non-standard manageability of networks has been a persistent problem for IT organizations, and it's getting worse with the explosion of new device types and technologies in today's advanced datacenter and operations environments," said Dennis Drogseth, vice president at Enterprise Management Associates. "Well accepted standards to help organizations monitor the status of devices are fairly pervasive, but managing the complex configuration and automation tasks that consume the majority of a network team's time and money are still, in general, poorly addressed by the industry."

"Open source projects are gaining increased traction in the networking world, and for good reason," said Scott Harmon, president and CEO of AlterPoint. "Customers are tired of carrying the load when it comes to integrating and managing the complex, heterogeneous networks that their businesses depend on. We're proud to collaborate with other members of the ZipTie Open Network Alliance in developing open source solutions and best practices that will help customers streamline network operations, and redirect critical enterprise resources toward more strategic business initiatives."

About ZipTie

In November of 2006, AlterPoint sponsored the ZipTie open source project and contributed code under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) to offer an open framework for multi-vendor network inventory management to help network administrators and engineers, hardware vendors and software developers break free of limited, proprietary hardware element management systems. To download the ZipTie toolkit or for more information about ZipTie please visit http://www.ziptie.org.

About AlterPoint, Inc.

AlterPoint network governance 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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