Clearly a believer in that old adage that if you say something often enough in the end it becomes true, the marketing manager of Clearpoint Corp repeated several times at the company’s networking product launch that the move is a natural extension of the core businesses we’ve been in. The core business is memory add-on boards and storage subsystems, primarily for the Digital Equipment Corp environment but also covering Sun Microsystems Inc, Hewlett-Packard Co and IBM Corp machines. As far as networking goes, Clearpoint launched two products, the Little Dipper and the Auriga, a multi-port bridge and multi-port internetworking board respectively. The two were launched under the banner that Clearpoint’s goal, whether in memory or networking is to offer products that improve the performance of corporate computing systems. The company says that at its Hopkinton, Massachusetts base, a research department within a research department has been set up specifically to address internetworking. The Little Dipper is a RISC-based bridge for Ethernet nets and offers 10 ports, eight supporting 10Mbps and two supporting 128Kbps. It has a filtering rate of 90,000 packets per second and supports thick and thin Ethernet connections. For remote applications it connects to public or private wide area nets at 384Kbps. The Auriga, which like the Little Dipper has been under development for two and a half years, is a personal computer board and provides similar services but with less functionality and flexibility and at a lower price. Auriga is also RISC-based has four ports but only supports ThinNet. For remote bridging a separate daughter board is required. The two products are priced at UKP12,575 for the Little Dipper and UKP2,960 for the Auriga card. Marketing manager Steve Mank admits that he is shocked to see what a difference there is between box and card prices in the industry, although he puts it down to upgradabilty of the box products compared with cards. Despite the price differential in its own products though, Mank believes that prices for the two products are both low enough to make an impact in the UK market. Clearpoint says that future products could include routers for the Novell IPX and DECNet market, but beyond that Mank is not giving much away except to say that we don’t simply want to be another good router and bridge company.
