Banyan Systems Inc has done for Windows NT what even the operating system’s maker, Microsoft Corp, hasn’t delivered yet: enterprise network directory services. Novell Corp demonstrated its directory services for Netware last week and hopes to ship them by the end of the year. Microsoft will incorporate its own directory services into the Cairo release of Windows NT in about 18 months. All this gives Banyan a window of opportunity to charge a pretty penny – $3,000 for 10 users – for its TCP/IP-based directory services, called StreetTalk, which will ship September 25. The directory – which keeps track of network resources – is a native port of Banyan’s proprietary Vines network operating system; Banyan also plans to port its Intelligent Messaging services to NT by the end of November. Banyan also launched Vines 7.0, which includes StreetTalk and new functions such as support for larger file systems, longer file names, greater server configuration options and additional language support, which will ship October 1 for $3,000 for 10 users. Banyan says it’s charging users the same price for Vines and StreetTalk because with separate prices it would be confusing for customers with systems that include both StreetTalk for NT and Vines to figure out which users were accessing data from which system. Or it could be that Banyan wants to give users an incentive to buy the Vines system and get StreetTalk to boot, rather than buy Windows NT separately and then fork out three bills for the new NT directory services.
