The Redwood City, California-based ISV has gained high-end router vendor Juniper Networks Inc as a strategic investor in July this year. As for the entry of T-Com Venture Fund into its equity, Nominum CEO Chris Risley said this investment further highlights the importance of an ‘always-on’ network in today’s information economy, adding that the roll out of next-generation services has raised the bar on network robustness, security and scalability and is boosting demand for commercial-grade IP address infrastructure solutions.
Nominum competes with the open-source Berkeley Internet Name Domain software, for version 9.0 of which the team of developers now at Nominum was largely responsible.
BIND has a 95% market share in the carrier market because it’s free and frankly pretty good, said Risley. However, the load at carriers has gone up through the growth of legitimate traffic and spam, with each email requiring around five to 10 DNS look-ups before it is delivered, and those look-ups taking place before it is filtered to determine whether it’s spam.
Worms have compounded the problem by making compromised machines go to the DNS server to find new victims, resulting in sudden 24-hour spikes that overwhelm a carrier’s infrastructure.
Formed in 1999 to write BIND9 and the ISC DHCP3 for the Internet Software Consortium, Nominum went on to develop licensable products, the first of which launched in 2003. With these it aims to make it easier for organizations to deploy and manage large scale IP networks and next generation services such as Voice over IP (VoIP) and Video On Demand (VoD).
