RENESYS LAUNCHES GLOBAL INTERNET INTELLIGENCE SERVICE

Almost five years in the making — the most recent of which became a profitable year — Renesys Corp. formally launched its Internet monitoring and analysis services this week with the hope of turning network intelligence into business intelligence for service providers and other large network operators.

The Manchester, N.H.-based start-up already does business with the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), its first and largest customer, as well as TeliaSonera, Telecomplete in the U.K., the London Internet Exchange and the Department of Homeland Security's Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT).

Renesys only has 20 employees, but it has 125 peering relationships worldwide that provide the company with the immense amounts of data it uses to extract performance and business intelligence from the global Internet.

Among those employees is Chairman Jay Borden, who founded Granite Systems, which became a leading inventory company with Borden as CEO and was acquired by Telcordia in May 2004. President and chief scientist Andy Ogielski was also part of Telcordia in Bell Communications Research as well as AT&T Bell Labs and Rutgers University. James Cowie, chief technology officer, comes from Yale University and Cooperating Systems.

Collectively, “We are experts on what is going on in the global Internet,” said Todd Underwood, chief operations and security officer for Renesys. “At every second of every moment of every day, we get a view of the whole Internet.”

The difference between Renesys and most other companies, said Glen Hunt, senior analyst of carrier infrastructure for Current Analysis, is what it does with that information.

“They are pretty novel in terms of most other network management investment we have seen for managing equipment and configuring services,” Hunt said. “That part of the puzzle has been solved, but this is one of the few companies that have stepped above that by adding a business perspective to it.”

The company is launching three hosted services, which are the result of five years of research on the intricacies of global Internet routing and protocols: Renesys Routing Intelligence, XML Connection and Market Intelligence.

Routing Intelligence was Renesys' first product. It is targeted at network engineers and operations center personnel responsible for troubleshooting problems on the network. It gives them the ability to correlate routing information across time periods and from multiple sources. It also allows for a little Monday morning quarterbacking by making historical data available as well. The company has been accumulating performance and routing data since Jan. 1, 2002.

XML Connection provides a set of application programming interfaces that developers can use to create reports or applications based on the data Renesys collects and correlates.

The newest product is Market Intelligence. Renesys uses historical and real-time high-resolution maps of the Internet onto which it correlates everything that happens on the network.

“Anything that happens in time and is about the Internet, if you correlate that on the map, a lot of interesting things happen,” Underwood said. Those things include the ability for a service provider to see how it and all its competitors are performing.

Renesys has built an Internet Index, which ranks and associates 180,000 individual networks on the Internet and allows users to drill down into any provider to get data on who they are buying from and selling to on an individual, geographic basis.

“So if you want to focus on the Ontario market and go after the customers of Cogent and Bell Canada, we can give you a tool to do that. We can produce a hit list of who you should be selling to and why,” Underwood said.

Another positive aspect to the Renesys business model, Hunt said, is that service providers don't have to instrument this solution on their networks; they can buy it as a service.