Australia's NICTA Spins Out Network Monitoring Company

Australia's Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Research Centre of Excellence, NICTA, has spun out its fourth technology company in less than six years of operation, -- Monitoring Division Inc. The new company will be headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and will keep its R&D office in Melbourne, Australia. The company has just completed its first round of funding with Australian venture capital firm, Starfish Ventures, raising A$3.85 million. NICTA has participated in this round. NICTA will also provide intellectual property and world-class research services and facilities to Monitoring Division.


The company arose from the Managing and Monitoring the Internet (MAMI) Project, which was based out of NICTA's Victoria Research Laboratory. The MAMI Project developed technologies for measuring the performance of the Internet at both the physical transport and the protocol layers.


NICTA signed its first technology license agreement exploiting research in the MAMI Project in December with Optium, a leading supplier of high performance optical subsystems. The commercial license agreement was for a new generation optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) monitoring technology that is compatible with next generation high-speed optical networks. OSNR is a key performance metric used to measure signal degradation. With this technology operators can substantially improve their ability to manage telecommunications networks.http://www.monitoringdivision.comhttp://nicta.com.au/