Re: Avoiding Confusion in the Marketplace
My advice, as an ardent supporter of both RPR and Ethernet, is to NOT
incorporate "Ethernet" into the tagline for RPR. You have a great name
as it is. Resilient Packet Ring is full of good connotations. If you
incorporate "Ethernet" into your sound bite, you will inflame the
Ethernet biggots of the world, dilute your message, and cause confusion.
The phrase I have heard to describe RPR is "A resilient access method
optimized for data packet transfer on ring topologies." If you want
to throw in a catchy buzzword, replace "data" with "IP". I believe that
this phrase captures the "value add" of RPR without positioning it as
a competitive threat to Ethernet.
To my knowledge, there are two aspects of RPR which relate to Ethernet:
1) RPR will provide a convenient way to transport 802.3 (including v2
Ethernet) packets without any format conversions. This is goodness.
It is a benefit to customers, and it is non-threatening to 802.3.
2) RPR will include several physical layer options, including one or
more which are based on the 802.3 1 Gigabit and 10 Gigabit physical layers.
This is also goodness, and also non-threatening to 802.3.
You can emphasize the "value added" aspects of RPR
(resiliency and ring topology support) without mentioning 802.3 at all.
You can also talk about the commonality with 802.3 in a positive light
which the 802.3 community will endorse and support.
My point in all of this is that you can position RPR as either a
competing or complementary technology. I suggest that you will be
better off if you chose the complementary route. It's better to
have the rest of the industry singing along with you in harmony than
it is to have them shouting you down.
Howard Frazier
DomiNet Systems