Mountain View, California-based Make Systems Inc, which specialises in network asset management software for wide area and router networks, is establishing a UK subsidiary. The new office is to cover northern Europe, and the company also has plans to open a Paris office to cover southern Europe in the near future. Make Systems’ core product is NetMaker, a network planning, modelling and design software system. According to Stephen Howard, the company’s founder and chief executive, Make Systems is the only supplier of network planning software to use device-specific libraries to model the performance of specific vendors’ routers and time division multiplexers. The company already has a number of customers in Europe, including France Telecom and AT&T Istel Ltd, but the new UK office will be its first presence outside the US. It plans to target PTTs and the banking industry. Howard comments, Early on, there was a lot of pressure to be in the European market. We were very careful about how we entered this market. There’s a significant amount of adaptation that has to be done. But Make has no plans to carry out any research and development outside the US. Make Systems has also announced a technology exchange pact with Wellfleet Communications Inc for NetMaker to be optimised for Wellfleet hardware. The deal joins similar agreements with Network Equipment Technologies Inc, Newbridge Networks Inc, Ascom Timeplex Inc, Tellabs Inc, AT&T Paradyne and Cisco Systems Inc. Make says it will sell direct, rather than via the hardware manufacturers with which it has relationships. We did attempt to do that in the early stages, for example with Ascom Timeplex, but generally what’s happened is that the distribution relationships have been less than perfect, explains Howard.
