AlterPoint, delivering on its vision for the open management of multi-vendor networks, announced today that ADTRAN Inc., CITTIO, Concursive and Silver Peak Systems, have joined the ZipTie Open Network Alliance (ZONA), a consortium of like-minded technology vendors dedicated to promoting standardization, interoperability, best practices and value-added tools for the networking community. These companies join existing ZONA members Citrix, Fortinet, Force10, Juniper, Riverbed Radware and Vyatta in supporting the ZipTie open source project for network inventory and configuration management, as well as the industry’s first-ever network management exchange, ZipForge, where users can download, develop and share scripts, change templates, adaptors, rules, policies, plug-ins and best practices intended to foster ongoing innovation in network management technology.

Damon Ennis, vice president of product management at Silver Peak said: “Many enterprises are faced with the common challenge of integrating best of breed networking solutions from multiple vendors”. “By working with ZONA, we can easily integrate the WAN optimization piece of the ‘puzzle’ with other key components for a seamless end user experience.”

The ZipTie project, through the commitment of AlterPoint and ZONA, has evolved to support hundreds of users, scale to thousands of devices and significantly improve security, giving large enterprises a viable, cost-effective alternative to vendor-centric element management systems. Nearly 8,000 users have joined the ZipTie community to-date.

Stephen Galbraith, vice president engineering at Empowered Networks, a leading management solutions integrator and AlterPoint’s partner in Canada said: “Our customers’ networks are getting more and more diverse, which makes network management more complex”. “ZipTie, and the ZONA initiative, advances our goal of providing customers with a flexible, integrated solution to effectively manage all of the different devices in their heterogeneous networks.”

Scott Harmon, CEO of AlterPoint said: “We are proud of the industry commitment to ZipForge and ZipTie that we’ve seen so far, and look forward to accelerating this momentum in 2008”. “With our growing user base, and ZONA’s contributions to the ZipForge management exchange, open network management is quickly becoming a viable competitive alternative to proprietary management solutions.”