Xircom Inc, the Thousand Oaks, California PC Card maker which likes to style itself a mobile computing leader, will ship a modular Universal Serial Bus expansion system next month that promises to take the company into some subtly different directions.
The new PortStation product will enable users to click together up to six different device connectors into a single unit connected to a PC’s USB port, and to daisy chain even more devices if required. It is not, the company confesses, strictly a mobile user’s product, nor one that will probably appeal to corporate users with an established LAN infrastructure. As such, it represents a debut for the company in the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) and small office/home office (SOHO) markets, for which the company is already preparing a marketing campaign that will see it target consumer-oriented publishing and retail outlets for the first time.
This development may stretch the company’s marketing resources, which will also have to rise to the challenge of meeting a range of different customer expectations as the company expands the variety of modules available for the PortStation set. To start with there is little that is not already familiar from Xircom’s PC Card range, with the first modules supporting range of multi-port connectors, serial DB-9 and Serial PS/2 twin ports, a 56K modem, and different Ethernet modules. Later, starting in November, the company plans to also ship an ISDN connector followed in the new year by a cable modem module and, once size and power constraints have been fixed, an ADSL connector.
These should find welcoming homes among remote workers and network deprived workers with smaller companies, but other plans to introduce wireless connectors, including perhaps a Blue Tooth module, or a GSM modem, may see Xircom – or prospective third party OEMs – wandering into consumer territory.
The PortStation concept certainly seems to mesh nicely with Blue Tooth, which could even enable a user’s notebook or desktop computer to become a wire free hub for a raft of different devices linked via an 8-channel Blue Tooth connector. With Europe in particular also waiting expectantly for higher-speed GSM services, such as GPRS (General Packet Radio Services), an expansion of the company’s existing GSM interface licensing agreement could see the PortStation idea housing a cheaper high-speed route to the internet for mobile phone owners.
But these are maybes, as is the prospect of Xircom raising its eyes from the PC space for the first time, and at last embracing the Apple user community. In the SME and SOHO markets, ignoring the Apple community, which also happens to represent some 50% of USB device users to date, can only follow. But for the time being, the official Xircom line is, watch this space.
