Gossip in the Sunday press a week or three back that BICC Plc was preparing to divest all its technology interests is believed to be wide of the mark by the people who run the BICC Data Networks Ltd unit. The Hemel Hempstead cable and data communications group is serenely warming up for the Networks 88 exhibition at Wembley next week with the launch of six new products and no sense of a sword hanging over their heads. Among the products, a new remote bridge is being touted by BICC as key to its future strategy which will concentrate increasingly on bridges, software that joins two or more separate physical networks to make a logical whole. Jeff King, network consultant at BICC, says the company expects to triple shipment of bridging products this year and forecasts that demand in Europe for bridging distant local area networks will grow by 100%. Costing UKP7,950, BICC’s product addresses the low end of the market and is a plug-in-and-go piece of software that links disparate networks over a 64Kbps private leased line. Two modes of controlling bridge traffic are available: a self-learning bridge which discovers the whereabouts of stations on both nets and only passes the necessary packets, and a pre-configured mode. Here, traffic filters give certain types of traffic priority. The Stock Exchange is currently beta testing the product. In addition, BICC has announced a serial manager called Isoview which will centrally manage local devices and in conjunction with the remote bridge wide area devices. The network manager package is based on Microsoft Windows. BICC has expanded its main Isolink MS-DOS networking family with the addition of the new 3.0 version of Multi-Protocol Support which offers increased performance across an Ethernet 802.3 network and adds three accompanying features: Isolink PC-NFS, a derivative of the Sun Microsystems Network File System, which enables transparent access to different architectures and operating systems; Isolink Netware 2.11, which BICC gets from Novell Inc and now covers three options – entry level system, Advanced NetWare and system fault tolerance – and third, Isolink X-Link, which provides file transfer and terminal access within an environment defined by the academic community.
