Nominum’s history is rooted in the origins and growth of the Internet. The company brings together individuals who have played key roles in the development of essential Internet protocols like DNS and DHCP.

David Conrad founded Nominum in 1999 to develop BIND9 and ISC DHCP3 for the Internet Software Consortium (ISC), leveraging the expertise of Paul Mockapetris, inventor of DNS, and Ted Lemon, author of the first widely-used DHCP implementation. The company provided training, consulting and commercial-grade support for these open source implementations.

In 2000, Nominum offered a DNS hosting service called Global Name Service, which hosted thousands of enterprise customers as well as several top-level domains. To deliver the superior performance and availability required for high volume service, Nominum wrote its own DNS implementation, not based on BIND and dedicated solely to the authoritative name server function. Using this DNS server, Global Name Service was able to provide 100% availability, with no downtime in a 12-month period.

Nominum saw that the continued expansion of the IP address infrastructure to support new uses and technologies would require a new generation of DNS and DHCP solutions. In 2002 Nominum sold its managed service business to concentrate fully on developing and supporting these next generation solutions. Today service providers, carriers and enterprises around the globe rely on Nominum’s DNS and DHCP solutions to improve existing networks and deploy next generation services.