An IBM telecommunications marketing manager talked about future IBM directions, but didn't give up any secrets. In general, he talked about goodness and motherhood and happiness but didn't deliver much real meat. One item important to IBM did ring clear, however:

SNA is here to stay. He claimed that SNA would become a "base for voice integration", but I haven't the faintest idea how that might come about. He emphatically stated that "We are not going to throw away SNA for ISDN. We have to figure out how to make them work together." IBM is giving lip service to the idea of supporting multivendor environments, but the IBM manager says that they would support other vendors' equipment "on an individual basis, by specific customer requirement.

The obvious conclusion here is that IBM's participation in the OSI - Open Systems Interconnect - standards process is largely for show, since there remains significant incompatibilities between OSI and SNA, and since ISDN implements the first three layers of OSI (and not SNA).

IBM has announced in the past year a T-1 resource manager, and channel to channel T-1 links. Also they have delivered ASCII-to-Rolm-to-S3x links. The implication is that they are beginning to integrate the Rolm product line into the existing IBM product line.

Remote operations is important to IBM. Netview, the successor to NCCF/NPDA, will gain more bells and whistles; IBM's intent is to automate and standardize all external interfaces, using Netview.

My opinion: IBM is behind the industry in a couple of important areas. They have not announced a T-3 product (for very high speed communications) and peer-to-peer communications (LU 6.2) is late in coming and overly complex.