As expected, the APPI Forum that was to have been the keeper of the proposed Advanced Peer-to-Peer Internetworking protocol has voted to dispand itself following Cisco Systems Inc’s withdrawal from the project. Members of the group say they will continue to pursue the opening of Advanced Peer-to-Peer Networking through IBM Corp’s APPN Implementors’ Workshop, and through the Internet Engineering Task Force. They are also to focus on developing the DLSw interoperability standard through the DLSw Working Group. The decision was made during a Forum meeting at InterOp in San Francisco. Some of the Forum members’ strategies now seem to be in disarray: SynOptics Communications Inc, which had placed all its eggs in the APPI basket, is now adopting a wait and see strategy, according to Mark Hoover, the company’s director of systems development. He says that the company is going to focus on making their hubs SNA-compatible, and enabling them to be managed via APPN, rather than providing a fully-fledged implementation as yet.
