It must have been quite a relief for the people at 3Com Corp when the independent report that they had commissioned on the problems of network managers gelled so nicely with its existing marketing strategy – it meant that the Santa Clara, California-based networking company was able to announce the survey’s results and at the same time make veiled pre-announcements of forthcoming products. Judging by the findings that the company kept emphasising during its presentation, the next month will see the launch of a scalable multiprotocol hub that can support connections between different local area network media and wide area network links. The Complexity Crisis, prepared for 3Com by Benchmark Research, quizzed 101 network managers and paints a pretty unpleasant picture of network managers disappearing under a morass of protocols, cabling standards and topologies. The managers’ complaints covered these aspects, but others as well. Some 84% of respondents pointed to lack of scalablity of current network offerings as a major problem. It appears that some of the grumbling wasn’t that well informed though – while 70% were very dissatisfied with current network costs, 34% had no idea about the level of their current expenditure on networks.
