Infoblox, Neustar form alliance

Infoblox and Neustar will announce Tuesday a strategic partnership that allows the two companies to resell each other's DNS products to enterprise customers and hints towards tighter integration of these offerings in the future. Infoblox customers include financial services firms such as VISA, healthcare companies such as Pfizer and government agencies such as the Nevada Department of Corrections. Tools cure IP address-management headaches Infoblox sells appliances that handle DNS, Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) and IP Address Management (IPAM) functions for internal corporate networks.

Internal DNS is how employees reach enterprise IP-based applications such as VoIP. Neustar offers the UltraDNS, DNS and load balancing services aimed at helping leading e-commerce sites such as Zappos.com and BuyOnlineNow.com handle external DNS queries without investing in their own global network infrastructure. Now Infoblox will offer Neustar's cloud-based services to its customers, while Neustar will resell Infoblox appliances. "Infoblox is a sales agent for Neustar's services including a global secondary service. External DNS is how Web sites publish the latest information about their DNS and IP address changes to their customers over the Internet. In this particular service, our customers will still use Infoblox as their primary DNS but in terms of the secondary services that is handled by the Neustar cloud," explains Richard Kagan, vice president of marketing for Infoblox. "The nice thing is that it will all be done through a single pane of glass. Neustar already sells a managed internal DNS service. "Think of the Infoblox appliances as offering an extension to our service portfolio that provides internal DNS components," says Jim Leach, vice president of marketing at Neustar. It can all be managed under the Infoblox [graphical user interface.]" Infoblox also will resell Neustar's services for external bi-directional DNS and global load balancing. "These are the kinds of things that most organizations are hard-pressed to [deploy their own] infrastructure for," Kagan says. "For those capabilities, the UltraDNS cloud is authoritative." Meanwhile, Neustar will resell Infoblox appliances to its customers that are looking to upgrade their internal DNS capabilities.

Neustar and Infoblox did not announce any special offerings that would marry their products together, but Leach said "we do see ourselves doing some enhanced services through joint development." The Infoblox/Neustar alliance comes at a time when Neustar's UltraDNS services face additional competition from DNS software vendor Nominum, which announced a cloud-based service called SKYE in September.