By Mary Petrosky
Network World, 07/18/94

The merger of Wellfleet Communications, Inc. and SynOptics Communications, Inc. is indicative of two key trends in the industry: the move toward switching technologies and the maturation of the internetworking market. These trends are leading to a consolidation of the players in this market, with both positive and negative consequences for users.

There is now a set of billion-dollar vendors trying to execute similar strategies helping customers transition from today's routed internetworks to internetworks built around switching.

The new internetworks must combine shared-access hubs, LAN-based packet switching and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) cell switching all in a manageable way. Several vendors 3Com Corp., Cisco Systems, Inc. and Wellfleet/SynOptics also may become end-to-end internetworking system providers.

As the industry moves to embrace switching, there are a few core technologies that internetworking vendors must have to survive. One is switching, and SynOptics has already invested $50 million in that technology. The other core technology involves interconnecting today's shared-access LANs with the new switching equipment. For that, vendors need to develop a type of hybrid switch and router something SynOptics couldn't easily do without Wellfleet. And Wellfeet was at risk of becoming a niche player as switching sales inevitably erode router sales.

However, the two companies have a lot of work ahead to integrate their product lines and create a cohesive, manageable whole. For the next two years, the key vendors in the internetworking systems market 3Com, Cisco and Wellfleet/SynOptics will be working to flesh out their strategies and product lines. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, so no one vendor is likely to dominate in the immediate future.

These vendors will help customers begin building manageable switched internetworks based on an end-to-end architecture. 3Com and Cisco have already begun defining these architectures Cisco has its CiscoFusion architecture, while 3Com has its High-Performance Scalable Networking architecture. Wellfleet/SynOptics will need to work quickly to define a similar architecture.

In addition, the market consolidation will help many organizations simplify the purchase, service and support of their networks. Many large companies have reduced the number of vendors they work with to a select few to ease the management of the vendor relationships. With the emergence of end-to-end internetworking vendors, customers will be able to get consolidated sales, service and support.

Similarly, the market consolidation will lead to better integration of technologies and products. Such integration is crucial in light of the challenges customers face in combining shared-access, packet-switched LANs and ATM. Although many ATM specs are in the works, it will be two to three years before truly interoperable products are available. In the meantime, vendors will offer proprietary implementations of functions like LAN emulation, switch-to-switch routing and congestion control.

Many customers will turn to the internetworking systems players for assurances of interoperability and end-to-end management. Ideally, the systems players should provide management functions beyond simply managing all the net components from one management console.

For example, 3Com's Windows-based workgroup management application, Transcend, manages 3Com hubs and adapters so that net managers can get information about hub ports as well as configuration data about the personal computers on the network. The management application can also correlate adapter information to indicate congestion levels on hub ports. Vendors of end-to-end internetworking systems are in the best position to provide this type of cooperative management activity between net components.

On the down side, customers need to carefully evaluate the strategies and product implementations of the leading vendors to determine whether value-added features and end-to-end management come at the price of being locked into that vendor's way of doing things. Both Cisco and 3Com, for example, are working to develop a split-router technology, where the routing logic (or path determination) function of the router is separated from the packet-forwarding component.

In Cisco's case, the company is planning to implement the packet-forwarding function in its workgroup switches while the routing logic can be running on another device. Cisco is defining a messaging protocol to enable the two parts of the router to communicate. This protocol will be proprietary; consequently, for the split-router to work, customers will have to buy their workgroup switches from Cisco, too. Cisco officials say they will work to make the messaging protocol a standard, but that process will undoubtedly take one to two years after the split-router design is implemented. SynOptics and Wellfleet officials have committed to open standards-based products, and we can hope they stand by their word.

Similarly, customers have to weigh the trade-offs between working closely with one or two key vendors to get manageable, well-integrated products and shopping among multiple vendors for the best of each class of product. It's unrealistic to expect one vendor to be able to deploy best-of-breed products across its product line.

We will continue to see consolidation in this market, most likely via acquisitions rather than mergers. Cisco, for example, lacks key pieces including workgroup and backbone switching technologies that it needs to be an end-to-end switched internetworking provider. Fortunately for Cisco, it has a considerable amount of money in the bank.

In this evolving internetworking market, all customers should press their vendors for specifics about their strategies and implementation plans. To avoid reinventing the equivalent of an IBM SNA or Digital Equipment Corp. DECnet network, customers need to make it clear to vendors how much or little openness they are willing to compromise for the sake of integration and management.

Petrosky is an analyst with The Burton Group, a Salt Lake City consulting and information services firm specializing in technology analysis. She can be reached at (415) 572-0560 or via MCI Mail at 599-3956.

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