The discipline imposed by QNX's message-passing design helps bring order and greater reliability to applications. In its simplest form, local area networking provides a mechanism for sharing files and peripheral devices among several interconnected computers. QNX goes far beyond this simple concept and integrates the entire network into a single, homogeneous set of resources. Any process on any machine in the network can directly make use of any resource on any other machine. From the application's perspective, there is no difference between a local or remote resource - no special facilities need to be built into applications to make use of remote resources.
Processes can communicate in the same manner anywhere throughout the entire network.
In some ways, a QNX network feels more like a mainframe computer than a set of micros. Users are simply aware of a large set of resources available for use by any application. But unlike a mainframe, QNX provides a highly responsive environment, since the appropriate amount of computing power can be made available at each node to meet the needs of each user. The QNX network is responsive enough to support both types of applications at the same time - QNX lets you focus computing power on the plant floor where and when it's needed, without sacrificing concurrent connectivity to the desktop. Flexible networking QNX networks can be put together using various hardware and industry-standard protocols.