Hauppauge, New York-based Standard Microsystems Corp is poised to push into the European local area network market. The company, which bought Western Digital Corp’s local area network adaptor business last October, reckons that the process of digestion is more or less complete; by year-end, it will have Token Ring products based on its own chip set and it is eyeing enviously 3Com Corp’s European Ethernet market share. The last couple of months have seen new offices opened in West Byfleet in Surrey and St Germain en Laye, just outside Paris.
Reliance on ARCnet
With Western Digital’s product line under its belt the company is attempting to break away from its reliance on ARCnet products. Historically, the Western Digital unit was an Ethernet company, but it had been working on a Token Ring chip set for around two years when purchased by Standard Micro-systems, according to Standard Micro’s regional manager for Northern Europe, Lyn Jeffery. Over the last nine months, Standard Micro has taken the work and brought it to the point where the chip set is now under test in the labs. The intention, says Ms Jeffery, is to have the first Token Ring products based on this chip set ready by the fourth quarter this year. The line will include both adaptor boards and Media Access Units running at both 4Mbps and 16Mbps. Assuming that it can keep pace in the silicon race, manufacturing its own Ethernet and Token Ring chips should prove a boon for the company. Certainly Standard Micro sees this as one of the ways that it will manage to differentiate itself – it is going to keep its chippery to itself and in a Token Ring market dominated by IBM Corp and Texas Instruments Inc chips, that’s particularly important. Since Standard Micro already specialises in fabricating chips, an extra production line for Token Ring versions shouldn’t prove too much of a strain on the business – the implication is that Standard Micro will be competing on price, and we may even see a price cutting war similar to the one afflicting the Ethernet market at present. More difficult for Standard Micro will be its attempt to break out of its component manufacturer straitjacket – it wants to be a solution supplier and as a start, it is focusing attention on network management. The first offering will be an SNMP-based personal computer agent designed to enable Standard Micro boards and the personal computers to be managed from standard management stations. Which sounds a bit like the personal computer agent that Sun Microsystems Inc, Intel Corp, Novell Inc and Synoptics Communications Inc are developing. However, it’s not based on that work at all apparently Standard Micro is concerned at Intel’s presence in the group, although Ms Jeffery says that Standard Micro will of course track any standard that emerges as a solid contender. The agent is expected to be ready in a couple of months, together with Elite View – the companies’ network management software. Later releases called Advanced Elite View will be extended to support management for other companies devices although it seems that the software with be sold mainly as an adjunct to Standard Micro hardware rather than attempting to take the network management market head on.
