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Technology Stocks : Newbridge Networks -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: pat mudge who wrote (11840)	6/10/1999 10:01:00 PM
From: zbyslaw owczarczyk	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18016

Cisco Addresses IOS Flaw For Some Customers (06/10/99, 2:54 p.m. ET) By Stephen Saunders, Data Communications ATLANTA -- Cisco is working behind the scenes to develop a more reliable version of its IOS routing software, Data Communications has learned at theSupercomm '99 trade show, held here. But not all its customers will be able tobenefit from the strengthened software. "We will initially be targeting service providers," said Peter Long, director of marketing for Cisco IOS. Translation: Cisco's enterprise customers will be stuck using less resilient IOS. The key feature of the new version of IOS -- code-named IOSNG (IOS next generation) -- is an operating system that compartmentalizes different routing functions. That should improve reliability by isolating software bugs. Cisco's current IOS code, in contrast, is essentially written as one big program, which means a glitch in one part of the software can cause the entire program to crash. Cisco's decision to produce an improved version of IOS for the carrier space comes as no surprise to vendors at Supercomm. "It's in direct response to their biggest problem: They can't deliver carrier-class [products]," said Laura Howard, vice president of marketing at Ericsson Datacom, in Burlington, Mass. The reliability of IOS came under attack on the NANOG (North American Network Operators' Group) mailing list last week when it was blamed for several recent Internet outages on service providers' backbones. The last blackout, on June 2, lasted two hours and severed links between the networks run by Cable & Wireless, in London, Netscape, in Mountain View, Calif., and Yahoo, in Santa Clara, Calif. IOSNG will be backward-compatible with IOS, Long said. He declined to give any other details, including rollout date, though observers at the show said they believe the most likely venue for this and other carrier announcements by the vendor will be the Telecom 99 show in Geneva in October. "It doesn't help us to have our customers all hot and lathered about something we haven't shipped yet, Long said. "What's important is what we can do today." Or, as some of Cisco's enterprise customers may be asking, what it can't do.