With the preliminary SNMP version 2 specifications going out now, manufacturers are going to have to decide soon if and how they are going to support the improved Simple Network Management Protocol. One company that is greeting SNMP 2 with a broad smile is Paul Freeman Associates Inc, a Westford, Massachusetts-based consultancy which for the last year has been selling its ‘Universal SNMP agent’ and has just announced that it will have an SNMP2 version available this year. The Universal Agent is aimed at companies that want to add SNMP capabilities to their network devices, but lack either the time or the expertise to implement the full agent itself. In essence Freeman provides an operating system-independent piece of generalised C source code that implements the agent together with tools needed to build the device-specific Management Information Base. Last year, Freeman’s Pete Wilson admitted that the market for the Universal agent was not that large – the main problem being that those companies that wanted to implement SNMP had already done so. Most business was coming from sectors such as uninteruptable power supply makers, where manageability was just beginning to make inroads. But SNMP2 opens up new marketing possibililties. The SNMP2 Sources will be finalised early this year, according to Wilson, who does not expect SNMP2 managers to come to market for two to three years.
