The widespread adoption of unified network management standards appears as unlikely as ever after last week’s International Communications Association annual meeting in Dallas. The market’s two most important players, IBM Corp and DEC, have rejected outright the opportunity to co-operate with the 60 member, AT&T Co and British Telecommunications Plc-backed OSI/Network Management Forum, in favour of promoting their own network management protocols, according to Computer Systems News. At the annual meeting, smaller companies admitted that only single vendor networks offered the prospect of seamless communications between networks; the network management systems on show in Dallas exhibited no overall management of mixed networks. OSI/Network Management Forum voting member AT&T demonstrated a network management umbrella, Unified Network Management Architecture, which the company claims is able to link systems from more than 12 companies – but only those vendors willing to sign agreements with the company. Moreover, the architecture is based on the OSI/Network Management Forum’s recently announced specification, so there is no chance of agreements with either IBM or DEC. IBM’s NetView is able to work partially with AT&T’s Accumaster product, through Cincom Systems Inc’s Net/Master, which AT&T has adopted, but data flow is one way, only going into Accumaster and not NetView.
