Things are becoming a little cramped at the low end of the local area network market. Apple Computer Inc’s decision to incorporate personal AppleShare into the System 7 release of the Macintosh operating system cut at a stroke the market for Macintosh peer-to-peer local networks, while Novell’s NetWare Lite has caused some soul searching on the MS-DOS personal computer side. So what do we find now but Alameda, California-based Sitka Corp, the Sun Microsystems Inc networking subsidiary that would like you to forget all about its parentage, and the company noted for its TOPS local networking software, teaming up with Tiara Computer Systems Inc, the Mountain View, California company that paid Digital Communications Associates Inc $2.5m for the 10Net peer-to-peer local area network business in July, and added 10% of its own equity to the price paid (CI No 1,707). The deal: to go for the heterogeneous systems networking market and woo users that have a mixed Macintosh, Unix and MS-DOS environment. As a result, Sitka’s customers will have immediate access to the 10Net 5.0 peer-to-peer network for their Windows and MS-DOS-only environments and Tiara’s 10Net customers will pick up Macintosh, Sun and PenPoint communications late in 1992. Under the terms of the agreement, Sitka has taken a licence to the 10Net 5.0 technology as well as resale rights to the product worldwide. Portions of 10Net in combination with existing TOPS technology, will be used as the foundation for OpenTOPS – a suite of cross-system networking products that Sitka hopes to release late in 1992. To provide cross-system capabilities to its 10Net customers, Tiara plans to obtain OpenTOPS for integration into its own product line at a later date. An awful lot can happen in that time, and should Apple ever produce Personal AppleShare for the MS-DOS personal computer, or should Novell Inc decide to add Macintosh communications to NetWare Lite, the partners could be in trouble. Nonetheless, the companies reckon that their combined peer-to-peer networking customers produce installed base of over 1.3m workstations and they will be trying to pull them all across to OpenTOPS from their existing networks.
