Interop 97: 3Com to continue shopping spree
James Harding reports on the latest moves from Networld & Interop, held in Las Vegas last week
Networking giant 3Com has not finished its acquisition spree after admitting that it has drawn up a secret shopping list of targets.
3Com CEO Eric Benhamou revealed that although the company is not keen to buy more companies as large as US Robotics (USR), which it acquired two months ago, 3Com is continuing to look for a more complementary company.
Benhamou said: ?We expect to make acquisitions from time to time. It?s not a race for acquisitions but for who can provide broader solutions. There is a shopping list but it?s not for public consumption.?
3Com will buy to ensure it owns the technology to offer products in the broad range of customer markets it has identified, he added.
Talking about 3Com?s competitors, Benhamou claimed Cisco?s directory collaboration with Microsoft showed it has not been able to be a viable competitor in the mass market by itself.
?Cisco is focused on the networking core. Cisco is not present in the small business and consumer markets now, so it is far behind. It has no volume distribution or desktop presence so it resorts to multiple partnerships,? he said.
Benhamou said 3Com will concentrate on connecting to the networking core, via modems and network interface cards. 3Com aims to control networking in most markets including the consumer sector, which it sees as the biggest opportunity.
He claimed Intel, which has been stepping heavily on 3Com?s toes with recent low-cost product launches, was only interested in PC ownership costs. ?We want to reduce the cost of network ownership.?
He denied the USR merger will be a logistical nightmare because the companies? salesforces will not be merged. Benhamou said the company was working on branding but confirmed the USR name will be dropped, although product names will remain.
Net cuts cost of global management
Managing global networks running on multiple platforms will cost a fortune unless it is done over the internet, according to Computer Associates? (CA) president and chief operating officer Sanjay Kumar.
In his keynote speech at the Networld & Interop show in Las Vegas, Kumar told delegates that security, constant changes of infrastructure and lack of bandwidth all contribute to skyrocketing costs.
?Costs are in people, platforms and rare skills,? he said. ?CA has examined customers, like Xerox and MCI, and what is missing is end-to-end management of systems.?
Kumar claimed CA?s Unicenter system management product is one of the few ways companies can address the cost and management problems .
He added that policy-based management, which divides networking resources into categories, was most effective.
The cause of most of the problems, the internet, is also the best platform to manage those problems, Kumar said.
Forrester Research estimated that 66 per cent of the cost of corporate network ownership is wrapped up in administration.
CA has teamed up with Novell to provide a unified management of intranetware and Netware environments. Under the agreement, Novell endorsed Unicenter TNG as its preferred enterprise management system and CA endorsed Managewise as its preferred Lan management system for intranet and Netware environments.
Network to follow in PC?s footsteps
The networking market will adopt PC commodity trends over the next few years as it is increasingly driven by advances in technology and better price performance.
Dave House, chairman and CEO of Bay Networks, said the PC industry took off when Microsoft Dos and Windows became standards, as applications drove demand and x86 chips improved price/performance. In networking, the standard protocol is TCP/IP, the Web is driving demand and routing switches offer better price/performance.
House said technology can advance to deliver one trillion bits per second within a century. In the short term, Bay?s contribution to the speed race will be a route switch processor (RSP) that routes 1.5 million packets a second. It will be the core of a range of switches to ship early next year, which will run on multiple RSPs to achieve rates of tens of millions of packets per second.
Bay will not try to force customers into proprietary systems. House claimed: ?Your supplier would like to say you only have one place to go. But I found customers resist that con- trol and vote with their dollars.?
He called on the industry to set standards rapidly for Layer 3 switching and urged users not to buy locked-in systems. Bay will introduce Gigabit Ethernet uplinks to its Switch Node Layer 3 device next year, as one of three prongs of Bay?s enterprise strategy.
The others are network management and value-added software called IP Services.