In response to what they characterise as changes in the market, Cisco Systems Inc, Menlo Park, and SynOptics Communications Inc, Santa Clara, have adjusted their plans for joint development effort on RubSystem, which was to have combined their hub and router technologies into one high end hardware chassis. Instead, they now intend to integrate the technologies only at the network management level. The market changes responsible are customer emphasis on the logical rather than physical integration of both installed and new router and hub technologies in enterprise data networks, the companies explain. Cisco and SynOptics see network management as the most efficient way to produce this integration. The other major change is the rate at which innovation is increasing in the hub and router markets – particularly the speed of Asynchronous Transfer Mode development. The companies therefore feel that hardware development should be decoupled, but that there should be tightly-coupled network management so the products can be managed as one. This latter process has already started with the announcement last autumn of SynOptics’ Optivity network management system and CiscoWorks router management software. The two companies are likely to work on other management features such as the co-ordination of their Management Information Base for use on popular network management systems and the definition of a common network management database for their products.
