Best of show

Same old, same old. That seems to sum up the vendor announcements at last week's NetWorld+Interop: many of the same vendors announcing the same stuff they've been announcing for months.

But there were some interesting, shining stars. Every month my firm, Current Analysis, gives some lucky vendor our very own RadioActive Award for the most important vendor announcement during the prior month.

This year, we have expanded this program to highlight the major industry trade events, such as ComNet, the Internet Commerce Expo and N+I. While most of the Vegas attendees were out mingling or dropping a quick buck into the slots, my analytical team (while I was admittedly out attending to other important business matters) was out on the floor looking for the top announcements related to the show. I emphasize the word "related" since many of the "show" announcements were actually made the week before.

We picked announcements in LAN Switching, Remote Access,Carrier Switching, Network Management and Partnerships. Announcements were evaluated based on their overall industry impact, the strength of the announcement, and the likeliness of product success. In addition to being made at the show (or the week before), they had to be relevant to the networking community (i.e., an announcement regarding Cisco investing in a dental supply firm - while interesting - would not necessarily qualify, nor would regularly scheduled financial announcements).

LAN Switching:
Our RadioActive Award in this category goes to Berkeley Networks, for its Firewall Accelerator Agent software. Coupled with Check Point's FireWall-1 products and Berkeley's exponeNT switch, this product boasts up to 40G bit/sec of TCP/IP firewall performance. Not too shabby. Our runners up in this category included Olicom's new ATM switching products, FORE's new ES-2810 switching products, and Cabletron's upgraded SmartSwitch.

Remote Access:
In an increasingly tough market, there were an number of choices and it took several rounds to crown ACC king of the hill with its Tigris Remote Access Concentrator. The Tigris is one of those products that is helping to redefine the word "big" in the remote access market, with its support for a mix of up to 252 PRI/T1, 1,344 modem and/or 6048 ISDN B channels per shelf (up to 5,376 modems per rack). Coupled with some solid NEBS and SS7 capabilities, this is a solid product. NEC and its new DataWave high-speed access solution and Cisco for their AS5300 voice strategy announcement were our top runners up in this category.

Carrier Switching:
This years award goes to one of our LAN Switching runners up, FORE Systems, for its ASX-4000. A solid performer in the LAN, this product looks to be just as solid in the ISP/NSP environment with its full ATM support for QoS and multi-media traffic (not to mention its planned scalability to 100G bit/sec). The chief runner up in this category was Newbridge, for its integration of ADSL with its 36170 ATM switching platform.

Network Management:
With all the advances in network and services management (i.e., SLA/SLM), this was a very competitive category. But this years' consensus winner was Tivoli, for its NetView 5.1 announcement - a product with solid end-to-end management features that will benefit most large IT organizations. Runners up in this category included Paradyne, for its new FrameSaver SLV and SLA Reporter products, Manage.Com, for its simplified view of network management , Sync Research, for its new FrameNode Release 7 management features designed to enhance SNA and IP network services and "And NetReality for its innovative WAN-side traffic control products.

Partnerships:
Always a tricky category, there were two solid contenders this year with IBM/Sprint edging out Lucent/Yurie for the honors. IBM and Sprint have partnered to provide SNA to Frame migration services designed to speed up the conversion of private to public services for the estimated 50,000 customers still using SNA within their core networks. Will this partnership revolutionize the world? Probably not. But it does make the market a bit more competitive and should have a tremendous impact on SNA shops (and the Internet) across the board.

Now, in addition to the above worthy announcements, let's take a look at the kinds of announcement we probably didn't need to see. May vendors use this to come up with a better crop of announcements for the fall N+I in Atlanta.

The "re-announcement"
This is an announcement that merely reminds you that a vendor had made an identical announcement sometime within the past one or two months. On the "new news" rating scale, these typically get a 1 out of 10. Unfortunately for us all, there were over a hundred of these pesky things at the show.
The "demo" announcement
"Vendor X is proud to announce the first interactive demo involving real-world solutions of its newest product [that was announced and shipped six months ago] in Booth 1234 at the N+I show in Las Vegas." What a shock - like we all expected the vendor to show up and demonstrate how to build a tool shed?
The "cloned" announcement
This is where a simple announcement somehow gets multiplied (or cloned) into two or three similar announcements. For example, a basic announcement "Vendor X Announces New VoIP Products" somehow gets released as three different press releases: 1) "Vendor X Announces Intent To Focus On VoIP Market", 2) "Vendor X Announces VoIP Interfaces" and 3) "Vendor Announces New Marketing Campaign To Focus On VoIP." Enough already. We get the picture. Variations on this theme include the "Strategy" announcement coupled with the "Product" announcement coupled with the "Marketing" announcement.
The "here comes an announcement" announcement
This total waste of time, paper, energy, electrons, disk space, etc. has become a real eyesore in the electronic pressroom. Rather than just announcing a new product/strategy/partnership, the vendor feels compelled to announce in advance that they will be making an announcement. Example: "Vendor X Announces They Will Be Making A New Product Announcement At N+I."
You can find out more information on these announcements, the good ones, not the cheesy ones (including our own competitive analysis), at the Current Analysis Web site.

If you have any favorite non-announcements from the show, send them my way. If they are good, I might post a few of the "reader's choice for no content" awards later this month.