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A big chunk of QIP's pricing stems from its licensing of the Sybase database. The product's cost drops to $2.50 per node at the 100,000 level, but that still leaves QIP costing far more than its competitors (although MetaIP costs slightly more at the 5,000 level.)

Among the features we wanted to see but didn't find was full HTTP access. QIP creates limited views of the network that are available via HTTP. The management interface still needs to be a native program, however, and that requires installing QIP at every single administrative machine. Had QIP included complete HTTP support, it most certainly would have ended up with a higher score.

The GUI is intense. It takes time to learn and navigate around in it, and it is not always intuitive. We found the excess of icons to be quite confusing, and we never felt very connected to our DHCP/DNS services.

QIP also returns unintuitive error codes. For example, we entered the wrong IP address for our server. When we went to start the license server, it returned an internal Windows error. Only after we maximized debugging on the server were we able to see that our license was actually for a slightly different IP address. It was then certainly a challenge to navigate the user interface, which seemed to us to be designed by people destined to be do-it-yourselfers.

Lucent QIP Enterprise, $2-$5 per port,based on volume, Lucent Technologies, (800) 408-2747, (610) 725-8535; fax (610) 725-8559. www.qip.lucent.com or info@quadritek.com