Unfortunately, proactive network management is going to become critical, whereas today, most networks seem to run adequately without it. It looks to me like we'll be using software provided by the hardware vendors and that software will be specific to their platform for quite a while. The reason for this is fairly simple. We're going to build switched VLANs as a mix of ATM and legacy technology like Ethernet and Token-Ring. Management for legacy technology is, at best, inadequate, particularly in a heterogeneous environment.
Management is also the poor and neglected son of standards committees.
So, given the likely late arrival of management standards for ATM and the poor state of network management today, it seems likely we're in the hands of the hardware manufacturers. If you don't believe that ATM management standards will come late to the game, look at FDDI as a worst-case scenario. Years after the basics of FDDI worked, the station management protocols were still in flux, and these protocols were only partially meant to assist n etwork management consoles in their job. A ton of effort went into FDDI, and we have some good features as a result. Unfortunately, we also have tremendously expensive hardware, particularly when compared with other 100-Mbps technologies.