For one thing, Boca will have to license its product to work with many different hardware vendors' equipment before it will be effective. There also are questions surrounding the architecture of ServicePlex. The initial version, for instance, lacks a key capability called autodiscovery, a mechanism whereby a provisioning or management system automatically identifies and obtains information from devices in a network, using signaling and interactive protocols. Not having autodiscovery could be a big gap for ServicePlex. Not briefed on Boca's product, he says he's not clear how the product will function without it.
Every switch needs to keep current as changes are made.
Another issue the Boca offering raises is how its gear will work with other signaling techniques. There already are a number of efforts under way to create signaling for provisioning and restoral in multivendor optical nets. These include the generalized Multi-protocol Label Switching effort being tackled by the Internet Engineering Task Force, as well as the work of the Optical Domain Service Interconnect Coalition and the Optical Internetworking Forum. For its part, Boca says it will be able to work with these protocols, which primarily function at the network edge, enabling routers to direct changes to optical switches - the core domain Boca is seeking to manage. The company has a total of about 12 employees, who are almost all engineers.