It looks like that the world will have another big player in the local area network hardware market from next month – Intel says it will make a networking announcement on September 4, and while it refuses to give details, others are not so shy. Earlier this month an analyst at US-based Montgomery Securities told his sales force that Intel would be moving into the token ring and Ethernet adaptor card business – it already makes many of the chips. The market took his views sufficient-ly seriously that Proteon Inc, which gets about half its revenues from token ring adaptor card sales, saw its share price fall by just over 5% the next day. Now Computer Systems News says that Intel will launch not only the expected adaptor cards, but also facsimile servers, local network management tools and protocol analysers. Furthermore it predicts that the comp any will follow up by announcing a range of personal workstations, specifically designed for network use. Intel showed its interest in the market in June last year when it introduced its Netport print server which enabled printers to be attached to NetWare networks directly, rather than via a dedicated print serving personal computer or file server. In May it bought the network products division of Lan Systems Inc, and with it a string of local net utilities. Intel would say only that some of the speculation is wrong.
