Sensor Area Networks (SANs)

[davidbrady]

Admittedly, I may have seen Gosling's prognostications some time ago and some of it obviously stuck.

Isn't it the truth, Digi is doing it and they've been in the forefront since the early 90's. They started out producing terminal servers. We used a lot of them in my days at Cisco Systems. They were founded in 1985 and went public in 1989. What they're doing now with the Connect product family is what we would term "technology agnostic"; i.e., they don't care what the nuts and bolts are as long as there are nuts and bolts, so they equipped their Connect lineup with everything including the kitchen sink. Sorta like the old days in networking when everything was up for grabs. We didn't know in 1989 that it would all distill down to IP over everything and Everything over IP so we built all possible combinations from FDDI, to Token Ring, to ATM, to Ethernet, and that's just the physical and datalink layers. If you recall, it wasn't that long ago when Novell NetWare was major contender competing against the TCP/IP protocol suite which has now dominated the Internet. In the old days (circa 1989) we'd build dual-stacks into our products to handle both NetWare's IPX/SPX and TCP/IP because we didn't know which one would win out - we were technology agnostic. In five years from now there will be a clear winner in the M2M market and companies like Digi will either simplify and consolidate their product lines or give way to newcomers. Till then it's a rich playing field reminiscent of the good old days!