NERD ON THE STREET

New Era of Networks (Neon) has gotten SAP America interface certification for its Neonet middleware products, and Neon officials are saying that this will allow customers to integrate applications with the SAP R/3 enterprise-wide application suite faster because of the rules-based nature of Neonet. The client/server and mainframe business applications from SAP attempt to provide comprehensive coverage of all facets of a business, and SAP offers modules for finance, manufacturing, sales and distribution, and human resource functions. According to the certification, Neonet received SAP's BAPI Certification as an ALE Converter for all IDOCs and all modules for R/3, version 3.1H; this provides a gateway to all SAP applications. Neon just recently rolled out its MQIntegrator software, which uses IBM's MQSeries as the messaging transport mechanism; MQSeries also has SAP certification.

Claremont Technology Group and ADC Kentrox have been busy developing a network management system for virtual LAN (VLANs) based upon Cisco Systems 5500 switches. Claremont has developed a methodology to help users focus on network design matters such as: organizational structure; traffic flow; redundancy; network protocols; and network management. After ironing out the strategy and details, Claremont is helping Kentrox with its implementation of a VLAN management system that would be used to monitor this increasingly popular environment. The new NMS would run under Solaris from Sun Microsystems, the HP Openview network management system from Hewlett-Packard, and the Cisco Works for Switched Internetworking (CWSI) package from Cisco. No date has been set for commercial availability.