Richmond Hill, Ontario-based BlueCat’s flagship product line is its Adonis appliances for DNS and/or DHCP serving. It also makes a line of anti-spam gateways marketed under the Meridius brand and is now adding the Proteus appliance for centralized management of Adonis devices.
David Berg, the Canadian company’s director of product management, said the Proteus device, which is already being tested by early adopters, would take the company into new areas of competition. The Adonis boxes, which themselves use the ISC BIND and ISC DHCP platforms, have traditionally competed with those open source packages, as well as Windows DNS and other BIND-based appliances, in particular those marketed by US developer Infoblox Inc.
Because Proteus enables what BlueCat calls enterprise IP address management, IPAM, it will move the company into competition with high-end DNS/DHCP server vendor Nominum Inc, as well as VitalQIP from Lucent and the Cisco CNR, neither of which are their manufacturer’s primary focus, said Berg. We’ll compete with Nominum at a fraction of the cost, he said.
He said the rationale behind the development and launch of Proteus is to enable companies with big networks to allocate IP addresses without impacting their operations. At the moment a lot of them are doing it will spreadsheets, he said. [IPAM] enables control of DNS/DHCP configurations across an enterprise, carried out from a single database.
