In what could be construed as a competitive lock-out, Novell Inc and SynOptics Communications Inc yesterday announced a wide-ranging long-term agreement to integrate products and share technology: it is dubbed a Strategic Development Agreement, which implies that other hub systems companies may be invited by Novell to form similar alliances, and it provides for joint research and development, co-operation in training and customer support, and dedicated Novell engineering support to SynOptics; the partners say the announcement comes in response to customer demand for the leading hub systems company, SynOptics, and the leading networking company, Novell, to form a comprehensive strategy for migrating current local area and internetworks into next generation networks that take advantage of emerging switched communications technologies such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode; SynOptics simultaneously announced the LattisEngine/486, designed to act as a network utility server enabling customers to distribute communications services such as NetWare’s routing, management and IBM host connections throughout an enterprise network.
