From: IMAGING.CLUB@OFFICE.WANG.COM ("Imaging Club")
Subject: VINES users air wish list
Organization: Mail to News Gateway at Wang Labs
Date: 02 Oct 92 16:06:31 EST

As requested:
                           COMPUTERWORLD
                         September 28, 1992

          Vines users air wish list, complaints during Q&A

Although Banyan Systems, Inc. users were generally happy with the direction
the company is taking, they took advantage of a question and answer session
with company executives to air a list of requests topped by complaints over
Banyan's upgrade pricing matrix for its five-, 10-, and 20-user version of
VINES.

Under that matrix, the price increase from five to 20 users is approximately
$1,000 more than double the price increase from five to 10 users.

Although the pricing was announced in February, most users were unaware of
the change until recently--and decidedly unhappy about it.  Banyan officials
promised to review the pricing structure but held out little hope that it
would change.  "We studied our pricing structure thoroughly and felt that this
was the best pricing for the value offered," said Jim D'Arrezzo, Banyan's
marketing vice president.

Banyan users also express concern about migrating from their Banyan
Corporate Network Servers (CNS), the non-industry standard 386- and 486-
based serves that Banyan has stopped selling.  Banyan responded that while
it still considered the CNS systems to be robust platforms, it would soon
announce special pricing programs for those wishing to move to Vines on
industry-standard personal computer server platforms.  CNS hardware would
be depreciated by users in the normal course of business.

Users also bombarded executives with requests to extend Vines support to
a number of platforms, including the following:

* Support for RISC-based systems, both as server platforms and as clients.
Banyan replied that it is in the process of choosing the first RISC platform
to which it will port Vines, and it polled users on their favorite RISC
platform.

* Scalable Processor Architecture-based machines from Sun Microsystems,
Inc. were the overwhelming user choice.

* Users also asked if Banyan could shrink the size of its native
protocols to lessen network traffic and free random-access memory
on the client.  Banyan said it was always trying to optimize Vines to
reduce network traffic.  However, the company would give no timetable
for enabling users to load Vines into extended memory, which prompted
angry murmurs from users.

* Symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) support for Vines 5.0.  SMP support is
available for Vines 4.1.  Banyan officials promised that SMP support would
be included in the forthcoming "merge release" of the two versions of the
Vines operating system.

* 5250 terminal emulation support so that Vines can enjoy the same
interoperability with IBM Application System/400s as they do with IBM
mainframes.  Banyan said no such product was in the works but that it
would investigate further.

* Support for application servers, such as print and mail servers.
Banyan officals suggested that users investigate using machines running
Vines on SCO Unix as application servers.
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU