Our Contrarian DDI Strategy

People often ask me, “When are you consolidating your DDI portfolio?” As I answer, “never,” invariably their facial expressions morph from eager anticipation to stunned bewilderment. After all, isn’t that what always happens when a company acquires a similar product? They “integrate the solutions to leverage synergies.”

Unconventional Wisdom

Contrary to these common assumptions, we believe attempts to perform such integration of two feature-rich, dominant DNS/DHCP/IPAM (DDI) software products would be counter-productive, as many other attempted product mergers have turned out. After shaking off the initial stunned reaction, questioners will often follow with, “but why are you duplicating development resources?” Fair question, however, while will do plan to invest in the evolution of both Diamond IP and VitalQIP in parallel, incurring a modest yet worthy level of inefficiency, we see this being offset not only by growing market share with the only IPAM-focused DDI solutions on the market and by eliminating churn thanks to our singular design approach and evolving surround architecture which expands features and functions for both products simultaneously.

Core DDI Pillars Extend DDI

Considering the three core pillars of modern DDI systems comprise a) DDI of course, b) automation and cloud, and c) security, both of our product lines are DDI powerhouses and as mentioned, they will continue to evolve. VitalQIP and IPControl are truly the only two DDI products where IPAM is not an afterthought. A single click or API call to automatically allocate blocks, networks and subnets topologically, with automated IP address assignments vastly simplifies the instantiation of a new VPC or branch office. Our DHCP server is also hands down the top performing server in the industry and our extensive DNS configuration features allow precise tuning for DNS.

Our automation appliances support the second pillar, providing a web graphical drag-and-drop interface for building automation workflows. These appliances ship with predefined workflows for integrating with ServiceNow, Terraform, AWS, Azure and other automation and cloud systems, and they are evolving to work with both of our DDI products, with pre-defined workflow nodes for both Diamond IP and VitalQIP REST APIs. Customers can leverage our canned workflows or build their own and create REST endpoints that may be invoked to easily incorporate DDI within their IT, IoT, and cloud automation flows.

DNS security requires both in-line DDI appliance level remediation and an aggregation and visibility layer with our DDI Guard and IPAM Auditor products. VitalQIP customers can leverage our recently released DDI Guard and Cygna Radar packages that run on QIP appliances to enable DHCP and DNS packet capture and DNS threat detection, while Diamond IP’s Sapphire appliances build-in packet capture and threat protection. Packets and related events are reported to the respective centralized repository in DDI Guard or IPAM Auditor. As we discussed in last month’s DDI blog, both DDI Guard and IPAM Auditor provide critical visibility to DHCP/DNS trends, events, and forensics for CTI.

Two DDI products, one unified strategy

Despite the naysayers and doubters, time will demonstrate our commitment to evolving both Diamond IP and VitalQIP product lines. And we plan to continue to build on all three DDI pillars, leveraging investments in both DDI products, as well as surround offerings for automation and security. We believe our approach will enable customers to continue using the best DDI products on the market, while enjoying continued enhancements within each core DDI pillar