Its deprioritisation of IBM Corp’s Advanced Peer-to-Peer Networking technology notwithstanding (CI No 2,636), the Marlborough, Massachusetts-based CrossComm Corp has licensed the High Performance Routing portion of the technology from IBM, and is planning to incorporate it into its XL routing and switching systems (CI No 2,684). The software will be available on the products during the 1996 timeframe, according to the company. Gregory Koss, senior vice-president of marketing at CrossComm, said the unavailability of the software was a key reason why the company put the protocol on the back-burner – although he denied there had been a de-prioritisation per se. Instead, he said CrossComm was adopting a wait and see approach. This was due, in part, he said, because we have not seen strong user demand for the technology. This he attributed to the fact that users have been concentrating on putting the building blocks of their next-generation networks in place, so, while there has been an upsurge in demand for local area network-to-Asynchronous Transfer Mode edge routers and Asynchronous Mode communications products, demand for Advanced Peer-to-Peer Networking will follow further down the line. Indeed, said Koss, APPN continues to be very important for the company, but we are looking at a couple of years out. That said, CrossC omm is not committing itself wholeheartedly to the technology at this stage. Koss said the firm will spend 1996 looking at the scope of what IBM does before it decides how much of Advanced Peer to Peer Networking it wants to adopt. He also pointed out that the firm has been shipping its Protocol Independent Routing software for routing SNA traffic since 1992 (CI No 2,108), so in that sense, the IBM technology will be just another choice for users. However, he conceded that, if Advanced Peer-to-Peer Networking does ultimately find market favour, it may be that PIR is superseded.
