Knowing what’s running on a network is a challenge for many network administrators — it’s a challenge that many vendors are trying to solve too. Networking vendor Cymphonix is one such vendor with its Network Composer technology. Starting tomorrow (March 17th) they’re offering a free 30 day trial of a new tool based off Network Composer call Network Revealer. The basic idea is to let you see everything that is running on your network inside of a slick web based interface.
“Network Revealer will help IT managers assess unsafe or inappropriate behaviors affecting their network–we see this as an effective way for companies to achieve ‘true visibility’ into their Internet through an easy-to-use software tool,” said Kevin Santiago, CEO of Cymphonix in a statement to be released tomorrow. “With Revealer we see an opportunity to bring our technology to a broader customer-base by offering the product at no charge, while giving our partners a way to demonstrate the technology to their prospective customers from the convenience of a Web browser.”
It’s a good idea and one that will likely resonate with many network administrators. Cymphonix has some interesting proxy detection technology that I wrote about earlier this year which is also neat in that it can help restrict and identify when anonymous proxies are being used.
Cymphonix has plenty of competition though, especially on the open source side with network monitoring tools and systems like Nagios, Groundwork, Zenoss, Hyperic and others providing visibility and control over networks. I’m not sure how Cymphonix with a limited free trial will compete effectively against those vendors that have a full time free and open source trial. That said, Cymphonix is hardware vendor too, and by making Network Revealer available under a limited trial, they’re likely to push some hardware business too (which isn’t what the open source vendors are really pushing).
