More "Ascend killer" nonsense from Mr. Katt
[Aren't these CSCO products scheduled to ship in late 1998 and early 1999 (if then) and about 1 year behind ASND? From reading his column for the last year, Spencer Katt has a WINTELCO bias to say the least.]
zdnet.com
Alpha support? The Chairman does it his way
By Spencer F. Katt
05.25.98
What do Frank Sinatra, Bill
Gates and Indonesia's President
Suharto have in common? Not a
damn thing, which is why
Spencer was so frustrated after spending hours trying to find
a common thread among last week's newsmakers.
The Chairman of the Board certainly got more sympathy
during the week than Chairman Bill. "He was the alpha and
the omega of it all," a distraught Tony Orlando (of "Tie a
Yellow Ribbon" fame) said in response to the passing of Ol'
Blue Eyes.
El Gato doubts that Orlando was referring to Digital's
processor, although the Alpha chip has been on the minds of
many over the past few weeks. With the Digital-Compaq
merger just about done, Compaq is pitching Microsoft to
throw even more support behind NT on Alpha.
One Digital insider reports that execs from the
soon-to-be-combined entity made a recent sojourn to
Redmond to ask Gates that Microsoft do three things:
publicly acknowledge that Digital/Compaq/Tandem will have
the best NT platform for the enterprise, accelerate plans for
improving Alpha NT support and endorse Digital Unix as the
best option for mixed Unix-NT sites.
Gates apparently signed off on all three requests, which
raises some interesting questions in the Mouser's mind about
the future of Microsoft's enterprise alliance with
Hewlett-Packard.
As if the Redmondians didn't have enough fires to put out,
the company had to scramble last week to plug a potential
security hole for Win 98 beta testers. Several testers told His
Hirsuteness that they received a note from the Win 98 team
saying that an employee had compromised their passwords
for a private beta newsgroup by sending confidential data to
unauthorized Win 98 sites. Microsoft had to bring down the
Winbeta server to fix the problem and issue all testers new
passwords to access the newsgroup.
With Suharto tumbling from his throne in Indonesia,
Microsoft rivals would like to see Gates' empire toppled as
well. And leave it to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison to recognize
a good metaphorical opportunity when he sees one. Ellison
last week dispatched his 7,500 minions to three days of
special morning showings of "Godzilla" at a theater near
Oracle's headquarters. The reason, he wrote in a memo to
employees, was "to celebrate the United States' decision to
fight monsters."
A fan of the Furball is fanning the flames of an upcoming
Cisco announcement. At an ATM conference next week,
Cisco has several "significant" introductions scheduled
regarding the marriage of ATM and IP. For example, the
company's been working on a new 20G-bps ATM switch,
code-named Wildcat, that's designed for carriers and ISPs.
It has redundant switch cards and most likely will implement
tag switching, Spencer's wirehead friends report. Cisco also
has an "Ascend killer" in the pipeline for high-concentration
remote access. This box, dubbed PopEye, reportedly can
handle as many as 960 digital modems and 1,000
channelized T-1s.
Early next month, HP is expected to roll out Version 6 of its
OpenView Network Node Manager. The new release,
which HP will unveil at its OpenView Forum meeting,
includes a new event correlation engine, a Web front end
and a data warehouse. HP also may provide some details on
integration of its disparate management tools, a promise it
made to customers in February.
Have a tip? Contact Rumor Central by phone at (781) 393-3700 or
via e-mail at spencer_katt@zd.com.
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