Lucent licenses NDS from Novell, Take that, Cisco.
By Scott Berinato, PC Week Online
October 19, 1998 2:49 PM ET
Quite likely that's the battle cry coming from Novell Inc., which on Monday announced Lucent Technologies Inc. will integrate NDS (Novell Directory Services) into its Cajun P550 routing switch.
The Cajun P550, acquired from Prominet Corp., directly competes with Cisco Systems Inc.'s Catalyst 8500 series of routing switches. NDS, which will run with management software for the Cajun P550, provides directory-based network management. With directories, users can greatly simplify network device management and step up their policy-based networking initiatives.
NDS for the Cajun P550, which will be demonstrated at NetWorld + Interop in Atlanta this week, is expected to be generally available in the first half of 1999, officials said. Further NDS integration across campus networking products will occur over the next 12 to 18 months, said Novell officials in Provo, Utah.
Increasingly, Cisco and Lucent are competing head-on, as Lucent has taken steps to snag enterprise customers from Cisco while Cisco has made it plain it wants to become a primary carrier equipment provider, a la Lucent. With services dominating the networking dialog these days, companies such as Novell and Microsoft Corp. find themselves in the middle, trying to hash out deals to extend their software service platforms.
Today's announcement could put further pressure on Cisco, whose users have pressed the San Jose, Calif., company to integrate NDS support in its products. So far, Cisco has licensed Microsoft's Active Directory, but not NDS. If network administrators with both NDS and Cisco hardware are planning routing switch upgrades, they may turn to Lucent's hardware to preserve and extend NDS rather than switch to Active Directory to keep Cisco hardware in place.
Network administrators have voiced concern over Cisco's support for Active Directory because the platform is not yet available. And when it does ship, it will be a first-generation directory, which many users say will be unstable.
Cisco has said it will support NDS through the standards process, specifically DEN (Directory Enabled Networking) and LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) version 3, both due sometime next year.
All of the companies mentioned are part of the standards process, although some users believe that base interoperability through standards will not be enough. Most foresee vendor-specific extensions to the standard to provide product differentiation.
Indeed, according to sources, Cisco, in a memo to its sales force, said, "Partnering with a specific vendor is necessary because Cisco's vision of directory-enabled networks requires close integration with the underlying technology to provide enhanced services on top of the directory."
Sources also said that today's deal is as much about forcing Cisco's hand as it is about integrating technology. They said a deal between Novell and Cisco will happen, and soon, and that only politics is holding it back.
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