Unispeed's Netlogger Suite promises to help ISPs develop and deploy applications for marketing, billing, analytical CRM, Web statistics, fraud detection, technical- and systems-error detection, and automatic content and advertising selection.

by Wayne Kawamoto [April 15, 2002]

With the release of its Netlogger Suite 2.0, Danish corporation Unispeed claims that companies can react in real-time to customer behavior on Internet networks and combine real-time knowledge with information that resides in databases. The company's modular Netlogger Suite is designed to parse, integrate, analyze, and combine data in real-time, and send the results to databases, ad-servers, and Web servers for real-time content selection and further analysis.

Unispeed says that its Netlogger Suite 2.0 is a tool chest for any ISP, telco, or Internet enabled business that wants to build applications in a variety of different setups, which was previously not possible. The modular building blocks that Unispeed supplies may make it easy to create and deploy applications for marketing, billing, analytical CRM, Web statistics, fraud detection, technical- and systems-error detection, and automatic content and advertising selection.

With the demands for high-bandwidth analysis and scalability, a single Unispeed Netlogger is designed to support network sniffing on up to 4 Gbps capacity networks, and be chained in parallel or serial, which increases sniffing or analytic capabilities. For clients with de-centralized hosting scenarios, the Unispeed Netloggers may be chained together via secure communications on existing Internet connections.

With the Netlogger Suite, websites may be able to merge data from a user's Web session with data from a database in real-time and then feed the merged data directly to a Web server. The Web server can then decide what to publish based on the input from the Netlogger Suite.

The Netlogger Suite 2.0 contains 17 different modules, and the company says that new modules are added continuously, which should expand the product's capabilities. Furthermore, end-users and third party developers should be able to create their own custom modules and introduce their own features inside the Unispeed Netlogger Suite.

Within the Netlogger Suite, the BST (Bandwidth Scanning Technology) module is designed to calculate an end-user's available Internet bandwidth, so Web- or Ad-Servers can target content in real-time to the end-user, based on how much usable bandwidth the end-user might have. With the Intelligent Page Impression detection module, the Unispeed Netlogger should detect page impressions, without any site- specific configuration, which may remove the need for costly manual labor to identify URLs that constitute a page.

The Unispeed Netlogger is designed to parse many different internet application protocols, making it possible to get a total overview of electronic communications. According to the company, for the first time it is now possible to integrate knowledge from Web-site traffic, with knowledge from internet mail lists and peer-to-peer communications, treating every part of the electronic communication equally—and being able to obtain a complete picture. "The Netlogger Suite 2.0 makes billing flexible for ISPs," said Morten L. Jensen, VP Unispeed. "Now it is possible in real-time to route the billing source data directly to a database —so billing can be completely automated. The Netlogger can read pricing matrices from external data sources and then calculate the client's usage and prices in real-time."

"With the Unispeed Netlogger there are no limits to an ISP's creativity when creating new products," said Jensen. "An ISP can bill on any combination of items and bill differently in real-time based on things like QoS, Bytes transferred, and files retrieved. The ISP can in real-time create individual W3C compatible log files for all hosting clients at a single point of collection and storage. It removes the 'mess' of having to set up complex scripts to retrieve the log files from many different Web servers, and makes sure that all log files are in correct time sync."

Availability and pricing
Netlogger Suite 2.0 is available now.

The product is modular and its price depends on the modules that a client wishes to purchase and the bandwidth it needs to sniff from.

Pricing starts at about $15,000 for simple logging systems for 10Mbps of traffic and increases for real-time analytics and data warehouse builder modules and higher traffic levels (up to 4Gbps).

—End