Hewlett-Packard Co and Cisco Systems Inc have reaffirmed their commitment to the marketing and technical development relationship, which they first announced in September 1994 (CI No 2,497). In the intervening 18 months, however, the scope of the agreement has changed slightly. Originally, the deal would have seen co-developed 100VG-AnyLAN products integrated with Cisco’s 7000 and 4500 router families. Cisco will now develop AnyLAN- based interfaces for its 7500 series of routers and subsequently for lower-priced systems, presumably including the 4500. The first modules are due to ship mid-year. The deal will also see an integrated router module running Cisco’s IOS Internetwork Operating System developed for Hewlett’s AdvanceStack hub series due to ship in the autumn. Cisco says the delay between making the original announcement and providing a time-scale for delivery came about for several reasons. Firstly, Hewlett wanted to assess the market demand for AnyLAN and secondly we looked at the future products that we were developing, like the 7500, and decided that AnyLAN was more optimized for that system. Unlike Hewlett however, Cisco is not taking any stance on whether 100Base-T or AnyLAN is a superior technology and merely wants to offer users a choice. Hewlett-Packard’s adoption of the Cisco Internetwork Operating System also represents a change from the agreement as originally outlined. Brice Clark, the company’s strategic planning manager at the Roseville Networks Division says that the idea was initially to implement common architectural agents between the Hewlett and Cisco systems. The decision to move from this strategy to a full-scale adoption of the Internetwork Operating System was in response to the desires of the marketplace and customers, according to Clark. Cisco’s dominance of the market led Hewlett to go with the Internetwork Operating System, since it found that users want to run the same operating system over their backbones and access systems, particularly where they are running legacy SNA traffic. For this reason, says Clark, I wouldn’t anticipate any other agreements with rival manufacturers.
