Bay Networks Inc and Lucent Technologies have announced what Lucent’s Carl Pavarini, vp of Multimedia Market Offers terms an unprecedented exchange of technologies: in the belief that the world will move to integrated voice and data networks, the companies are pooling many of their core technologies, and will individually build products combining voice and data.
Specifically, Bay is contributing many of its family jewels, including source code for its routing technologies; its Optivity network management solution; its Asynchronous Transfer Mode Private Network to Network Interface, and Integrated Private Network to Network Interface implementations; and the Resource Reservation Protocol. Lucent is putting in voice technologies covering real-time switching of voice traffic; multimedia; multimedia middleware; and store and forward voice switching. The companies intend to jointly develop a master architecture for multimedia networks – incorporating ATM backbone technology, LAN components, WAN access, remote access and network mangement – and each will then develop products based on this. They are intending to guarantee interoperability between their products, and are currently working on integrating Lucent’s Definity network management software with Bay’s Optivity for seamless network management. The products are due to start shipping in Q3. Bay claims that the agreement with Lucent is not in conflict with its recently-announced interoperability agreement with IBM Corp and 3Com Corp (CI No 2,917) – although Robin Newman, the company’s vp of switched internetworking products, did reveal that Bay did not discuss the Lucent deal to its partners prior to its announcement. The Network Interoperability Alliance (NIA) partners are also using I-PNNI, he said, preserving compatability with what Lucent and Bay are planning, and he added that the NIA is intended as an evolving partnership, so that 3Com and IBM can follow the same path if they so choose.
