CABLETRON Systems R & D strength and its focus on software management has put Cabletron 'boxes' into customer sites where it has no hardware installation at all, according to Alan McMillan, managing director of the networking company's Asia-Pacific region.
Cabletron claims its Spectrum network management software, an open object-oriented tool initially modelled to work along the lines of Hewlett-Packard's OpenView, is poised to become the industry's leading network manager following the release last year of version 4.0.
'A lot of people have Spectrum managing their networks when they don't even have our hardware,' Mr McMillan said last week.
The latest release includes the capability to manage devices and workstations running Windows NT as well as various flavours of UNIX.
It competes mainly with OpenView and offerings from SunSoft, the software division of Sun Microsystems and IBM.
In such a segmented industry, where each networking company such as 3Com, Cisco, Bay Networks, Digital, Cabletron or HP can claim market leadership in at least one product-specific area, the target of being No 1 in a particular field means little except for the satisfaction of making money ahead of all the others.