Nominum Gets Benefit Of DNS Experience

After restructuring its business model, Nominum is about to launch in the United States a channel program led by Miguel Nhuch, who is credited with creating the channel program for WebLogic prior to its acquisition by BEA Systems.

Originally founded with the purpose of selling consulting services and support around an open-source technology, Redwood City, Calif.-based Nominum now offers a carrier-class Domain Name System (DNS) server and associated management platform to organizations that require high transaction lookups on a DNS server.

Nhuch, vice president of sales and channels at Nominum, has already set up a channel program for the company in Europe and will follow the U.S. effort with a similar program in Asia.

To date, the use of Nominum's technology has been limited to telecommunications carriers and large global enterprises.

But in coming months, company executives said they expect to see a broader adoption of RFID tags and Internet telephony applications, which in turn will create a greater need for a DNS server that can support large volumes of DNS lookups. For example, the EPC Global Consortium, which is charged with overseeing the development of RFID standards, has already endorsed the core technology under the Nominum domain server. And IP telephony applications will require phone number lookups across the Internet.

Most server platform vendors today bundle a DNS server with their operating systems. But carrier-class requirements for those servers cannot keep up with the volume of DNS lookups needed, said Nominum chief scientist Paul Mockapetris, who is credited with creating DNS.

While larger enterprises have been the traditional market for commercial DNS products such as Nominum's, midsize customers are starting to show interest as they increasingly become dissatisfied with open-source approaches to DNS, said Mark Fabbi, vice president at the Gartner research firm.

"There is a level of frustration with open-source tools because they do require a good amount of care and feeding [to keep up with development advances]," Fabbi said.

Nominum also offers a toolkit that allows customers to customize their implementation and is available in an appliance version that can be used to thwart malicious network attacks.