The InterOp ’89 technical conference and exhibition has traditionally been a premier forum for the TCP/IP user and vendor community. Not this year. In a sign of the times that the end of TCP/IP’s days is in sight, albeit distant, it was the rival Open Systems Interconnection camp that drew all the attention. A group of 13 systems manufacturers, communications vendors, and other interested parties used InterOP ’89 – held last week at the San Jose, California Convention Centre, in the heart of Silicon Valley – to prove that Open Systems Interconnection is real. Although each vendor had its own booth, they banded together and rented a separate booth for a joint demonstration of the interoperability of their respective Open Systems products. In addition, they held a special press briefing to offer technical details and answer questions about the state of the Open Systems Interconnection market. The main idea was to demonstrate that compliant systems were was capable of true interoperability. To that end, the network consisted not just heterogeneous hardware, operating systems – Unix, Ultrix and PrimOS for example – and network protocols – IEEE 802.3, 802.4 and 802.5 – but also of connections to TCP/IP networks and X25 wide area networks. Sales have lagged At the press briefing, vendors admitted that Open Systems Interconnection sales have lagged, but insisted that as more products become available, user demand increases. Retix Inc, considered one of today’s big winners in the Open Systems Interconnection market, said the majority of sales have come from OEM customers and a few major corporate customers that happen to be technological pioneers. Vendors admit that the market has been slow to take off, a fact they attribute to its relative immaturity, when compared with TCP/IP, and that some important specifications are as yet undefined. Still, they agreed the biggest potential customer for Open Systems networking now is the US federal government. With the US federal government now pushing the GOSIP specification – based in large part on the seven layer standard – they say there’s little doubt that the interconnection standard will take off soon. Some even claim it should achieve dominance over TCP/IP within five years. The joint demonstration, under the banner OSI Open For Business, did prove what its creator hoped: that the model has matured into a real multi-vendor networking option. However, it also highlighted the real problem users will face in multi-vendor networks: network management. Each vendor used its own system, and while most are based on the industry standard, Simple Network Management Protocol – SNMP – none are exactly alike, and the phrase we didn’t agree to demonstrate that kept cropping up. Then no one could agree that SNMP would be the ultimate or only network management protocol standard for Open Systems Interconnection. Quite the contrary, as vendor after vendor said they would offer the CMIP network management protocol when the specifications had matured. After a discussion that ran on much too long, it was finally agreed that both vendors and users will be living in a multi-protocol, multi-operating system, multi-network management world for the forseeable future. Indeed, there seemed to be a common nod of approval at the prospect that Open Systems communications systems and equipment vendors will support both the SNMP and the Open Systems Interconnection-based CMIP management standards.
