Gentlemen, > What I'm personally surprised though is why nobody hires people (like us) > to develop translators / gateways between those dialects. That's > probably a hell lot cheaper than replacing your core network from one > vendor with another vendor...
Hm, Consider this: For a network operator, the game is to get as close to 99.999....% uptime as economically possible. Why? If something breaks, and you can't fix it within the hour, you'll lose your credibility, and your customers will eventually move to another network. So its really all about business continuity, reliability and risk management. >From this perspective, it is seen as an advantage to buy several systems from the same vendor, as it is assumed that these systems have seen a priori more testing time and are thus more reliable than any multi-vendor combination has seen/would be. Should there be a problem, it is also a lot easier and faster to get support from a vendor, when he can't first try and blame the other vendors box, or the translator in between. Here, again, risk management... While the lock-in is indeed a bad thing, it is still considered the lesser evil, compared to the effort needed to do q/a testing in mixed systems on nation-size scale plus R&D for the translators plus battling for support with N competing vendors, all blaming each other. This is the oh-so-familiar argument on why many companies use exclusively Microsoft, or everything Apple, etc... Just my 0.05 chf on why translators did not happen... (yet?) Cheers, Thomas -- Excercise 17: If the human brain was simple enough for us to understand we'd be so simple we couldn't understand. Prove this by induction.
