Getting married to your switch vendor. (vendor-specific computer network architectures)

Business Communications Review, July, 1994 by Passmore, David

Last month, in the launch of this new BCR column, I discussed the paradox of network product commoditization, which made the point that "commodity" products like hubs, routers and ATM switches are becoming much more vendor-specific in terms of their features and functions. Despite professed vendor support for open standards, organizations attempting to build enterprise-wide networks will increasingly find themselves locked into single-vendor backbones--if not entire networks.

We've been down this road before. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, we saw the introduction of network architectures like Digital's DECnet, Apple's AppleTalk, Unisys's Burroughs Network Architecture (BNA), Honeywell's Distributed Network Architecture (DNA), Xerox's Xerox Networking...

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