Dartmouth spins off software company "Dartware"

Posted 05/31/00

Dartmouth College, two of its former employees and a Hanover-area businessman recently joined forces to launch Dartware, LLC, a new company which will continue development and marketing of the InterMapper network monitoring software developed at Dartmouth.

Principals of the new company are Rich Brown, a 20-year veteran of Dartmouth Computing Services; Bill Fisher, another former Dartmouth Computing Services staff member who is also a 1993 graduate of Dartmouth; and Stuart Pompian, an area businessman. Dartmouth has a 20 percent equity stake in the company, which set up offices at 25 S. Main St. in Hanover in April.

"I am very pleased to see this project spin out," said Larry Levine, Dartmouth's Director of Computing. "The College regularly produces great technologies. It's wonderful for such projects to have world-wide exposure and worthwhile to reap a return for this work."

InterMapper monitors a wide variety of network devices and servers, and reports problems to the network manager using audible alarms, e-mails and pager notifications. InterMapper uses Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) to find the routers of the network, then determines the interconnections between those routers and draws a map to show their status. It is easy to add hosts, servers, and other equipment to the maps as well.

Dartmouth began using InterMapper in 1995 to monitor its own data network, comprised of hundreds of routers, switches, hosts, and servers, and nearly 10,000 workstations and personal computers. Although SNMP was becoming a standard at that time, Dartmouth also had over a hundred locally-developed routers that did not use SNMP and thus chose to build its own program since it couldn't find a commercial alternative.

InterMapper has been on the market since 1996 and has sold well to all kinds of network managers in education, large and small corporations, government departments and non-profit organizations.

"Our customers tell us that the best part about InterMapper is that it graphically shows them what's going on in their network," said Rich Brown, President of Dartware. "The maps clearly show devices that are up, down, or edging toward failure. But perhaps their favorite feature is the way we show traffic flowing through the network. InterMapper places animated dots next to heavily-loaded links -- which our customers call 'ants'."

For further information on InterMapper; SNMP Watcher, an SNMP MIB browser; and MacPing, a network troubleshooting tool for multiprotocol networks, contact:

Dartware, LLC
25 S. Main Street
PO Box 130
Hanover, NH 03755
603-643-2268 (voice)
603-643-2289 (fax)
intermapper@dartware.com