Banyan Vines networks flourish in federal gardens
Connecting state and local government leaders
The Marine Corps is moving away from its longtime network partnership with Banyan Systems Inc. and migrating to Microsoft Windows NT Server, said Greg Edwards, federal sales manager for the Westborough, Mass., networking company. But Banyan's ties to other federal organizations are growing. The Treasury Department's Office of the Comptroller uses Banyan consulting engineers to migrate from Banyan Vines to a StreetTalk for NT network, he said.
The Marine Corps is moving away from its longtime network partnership with Banyan
Systems Inc. and migrating to Microsoft Windows NT Server, said Greg Edwards, federal
sales manager for the Westborough, Mass., networking company. But Banyans ties to
other federal organizations are growing.
The Treasury Departments Office of the Comptroller uses Banyan consulting
engineers to migrate from Banyan Vines to a StreetTalk for NT network, he said.
Users who go from Vines to NT can keep Banyan StreetTalk directory and messaging
services under StreetTalk for NT.
Banyan also is consulting with the State Department about expanding its Vines network.
The Air Force Academy is extending its Vines network, and the Immigration and
Naturalization Service is adding new Banyan locations, he said.
There are lots of customers staying the Banyan course, Edwards said.
Customers that a couple years ago thought they were going to flip the switch to NT
have now come back to upgrade their network to Vines 8.5.
The Air National Guard, which had announced plans to build an NT Server network, is
upgrading its 45,000-Vines network to Vines 8.5, Banyans year 2000-ready release.
In many cases, administrators and technicians who were handed the task of migrating to
NT found it much more difficult than originally thought, Edwards said.
NTs memory requirements for client hardware, for example, are exponentially
greater, Edwards said.
Up to the current Vines 8.5, Banyan has continued to support low-memory MS-DOS and
Windows 3.x clients.
Edwards said Banyan has returned to profitability after restructuring, and it has Vines
9.0 and StreetTalk for NT 9.0 on the drawing board. Vines 8.6 is due out this summer
and 9.0 by end of the year, he said.
Several new Banyan products improve intranet building, said Shaun Hayes, the product
line manager.
Banyan Intranet Connect lets authorized users log on and access Banyan enterprise
network resources such as file and print services with nothing more than a Web browser,
Hayes said.
Banyan has put the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol into the StreetTalk directory
service and added the Internet Messaging Access Protocol to its messaging service.
Authorized users can access directory and messaging services through a Web browser, Hayes
said.
Another new product, Banyan Intranet Protect, lets administrators secure information on
Web servers using the same tools with which they apply security and define users in the
StreetTalk directory.
In contrast, Web server security based on NT domains remains difficult for large,
geographically dispersed organizations, Hayes said.
Web security on NT Server networks requires administrators to create a fairly complex
set of trust relationships between NT servers, he said. The administrators must create
global groups and export them to each of the NT domains.
The multivendor Banyan Intranet Protect software secures information hosted on
Microsoft Internet Information Server and Netscape Enterprise Server, Hayes said.
Banyans role is helping people build multivendor intranets, which is a
pretty logical role to be taking, he said.
Contact Banyan Systems at 508-898-1000.
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