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Technology Stocks : Cisco Systems, Inc. (CSCO) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JRH who wrote (19705)	12/7/1998 9:04:00 AM
From: Spartex	Respond to of 77400

Support Falls Short -- Cisco's premature announcement to embrace NDS standards rattles VARs Julie Bort User-level granularity is today's holy grail of networking. That means tying it all to the directory. The quest for a de facto directory standard-or perhaps even an official standard-promises to be one of the hottest and most important battles of the turn of the millennium. So chalk one up for Novell Inc.'s NetWare Directory Services (NDS) when, at Fall Comdex, Cisco Systems Inc. grudgingly acknowledged that it would be supported somewhat by the hardware giant's products. Still, Novell VARs shouldn't throw down their weapons just yet. Cisco is planted so firmly on the fence on this one, it must be feeling pain in its collective seat. Specifically, Cisco has said it will provide interoperability between NDS and CiscoAssure products-in particular, Cisco User Registration and Tracking, and the Cisco Network Registrar. Novell is trumpeting Cisco's announcement as a major coup "for obvious reasons." "Cisco has announced integration with NDS and shipping of product in the first half of 1999," says Michael Simpson, director of marketing for Novell. "It will be integrating CiscoAssure Policy management products with NDS. That's different than what Cisco promised in its announcement with Microsoft, which was for future hardware." Dig a little deeper, however, and VARs will find that Cisco still hasn't given them the kind of support for NDS that they have been demanding. Cisco, which is up to its elbows helping Microsoft Corp. develop the competing Active Directory, was pressured by its competitors into making a statement that appeared to be in support of NDS. In the past few weeks, Nortel Networks and Lucent Technologies Inc. signed licensing agreements with Novell; both will implement direct NDS support and also bundle NDS with certain products. In contrast, Cisco's announcement with Novell fell far short of a licensing agreement. Instead, Cisco vaguely promised "interoperability" between CiscoAssure products and NDS. That interoperability will come from standards, not direct hooks. Namely, Cisco will support the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and the Desktop Management Task Force's emerging Directory Enabled Network (DEN) specification, says Jim Turner, senior manager of network management partnerships at Cisco. DEN is the directory standard spawned by Microsoft and Cisco, and recently handed over to the task force for further development. "This is an announcement to support standards-based directory operation," says Turner. "As standards evolve, Novell will evolve products. We're not integrating NDS in our products. We will take advantage of Active Directory." So, Cisco will support standards, and because NDS supports them, network designers will have interoperability. Systems integrators remain disappointed. "We've been hoping that Cisco and Novell will come to an agreement," says Geno Callens, chief executive of Cal Data Systems Inc., a 35-employee enterprise systems integrator in Houston. Callens says confusion over Cisco's announcement and its stance with NDS in general has been hurting NDS sales, but recent announcements from Lucent and Nortel have helped to allay customers' fears about investing in the directory software. Ideally, Callens would like Cisco to be less partial to Active Directory. "Active Directory will be an integral part of NT 5.0, so you can't help but sell it. But what I'd like to see Cisco do is fully implement the IOS to be compatible with both directories so you can configure major portions of the infrastructure from one place," Callens says. "Novell continues to add hooks so people can do this. But we don't want to see Novell write these apps. We'd like Cisco to do what they do best." But Novell plans to plow ahead with writing applications that will perform management and remote configuration of hardware from Cisco, as well as Lucent, Nortel and other vendors. At Comdex, Novell also demonstrated such technology, based on Java, which it vows will be the basis for new Novell products during the next 18 months. "We built a Java agent and integrated it with NDS. It provides automatic configuration of routers, automatic discovery and mass updates," says Simpson. "It sets the intelligence in the directory." Still, even if Cisco never embraces NDS directly, all VARs ask is for players to move to a consistent set of standards, and they'll do the rest. LDAP could be the ticket, they say, enabling VARs to tie the directory to networking and communication services. techweb.com