Services top the agenda for Networks-telecom exhibitors

The biggest event in the networking industry diary kicks off on Tuesday in the shape of Networks-telecom 2000, and some of the headlining exhibitors have been giving silicon.com a sneak preview of their forthcoming strategies.

Among the companies represented in Birmingham is Novell, which has recently driven through a restructuring programme in response to poor sales figures and changes in the industry. Steve Brown, Novell's UK MD, told silicon.com how the company intends to make up for lost ground.

He said: "We've got to be market driven and look at what the customers are actually requiring. Everything these days is very much solutions based. Five or six years ago when Novell was selling products like Netware 3, it was very much the movement to LANs and WANs. Now we're looking at huge enterprise organisations and the huge internet economy out there."

Another top issue at the show will be how to improve network resilience. According to a recent Gartner Group survey, human error is the cause of 80 per cent of network downtime.

Alan Edwards, Sun Microsystems' professional services marketing manager, claims vendors need to start shouldering some of the blame for this.

He said: "Sun's position on this is that the vendors need to take some responsibility for that downtime through services, through education and training for the customer, in the customer's environment, not just against the hardware platform. We can than solve this by building these services into the service delivery for them"

These exclusive interviews, together with reviews of other vendors and ongoing news updates, can be found at silicon.com's dedicated Networks-telecom website at http://www.silicon.com/networks-telecom2000 .