Matrix internet and Directory Services, the company that brings you John Quarterman’s Internet Weather Report (http://www.internetweather.com/), has announced a new internet monitoring and reporting service called Matrix IQ. VP of sales Philip Worob says that as a result of the Weather Report and other publications, Matrix had found itself getting a lot of interest from the administrators of internet service providers and large corporate intranets who needed to source similar information for their own internal use. MIQ will provide ISPs with not only internal information – latency, packet loss, retrieval, that sort of thing – but also how they relate to internet as a whole, Worob explains. It will answer questions like, ‘How does their performance compare with that of their customer base?’ and ‘What about the people who are accessing their network from the outside?’ Worob believes having this information will help not only technical staff who have to manage capacity and route around damage in emergencies, but also the people on the marketing side. We can provide a lot of obvious measurements that will show how various ISPs perform. It’s a big selling point, he says. As well as ISPs, Matrix wants large corporations to buy MIQ for their intranets. The company argues much as Netscape does that the IT departments of corporations like General Motors and Boeing are now being expected to function as enterprise service providers, and that their information needs are therefore nearly identical to those of an ISP. To source its statistics, MIQ places computer beacons at various points inside a given network. These measure one of about six metrics, including latency, packet loss, throughput and retrieval time. The actual number and nature of the metrics is to be detemined by Matrix’s technical staff working along with launch customers PSINet and Jump Point, an Austin, Texas-based ISP. Worob says MIQ has only two competitors, both of which he says are indirect. One is a product called Inverse, which studies busy signals to find out how well people are getting onto their ISPs. More significant to Matrix is Keynote, which provides a monthly report to its customers. Matrix has gone the extra mile by providing close to real time data through MIQ. Keynote also charges substantially more, says Worob, estimating the average price for a Keynote subscription around $500,000/year. No precise figures are available for MIQ, but Worob says it won’t be as much as that.
