Problem: Bob Briscoe: Do vendors want standards in this space? There are a lot of proprietary products; I would like to hear from other vendors who also would like to see this. We have asked in the mailing list about this, and it has been discussed in this thread: <http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/tcmtf/current/msg00480.html> http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/tcmtf/current/msg00480.html This post from Wes summarizes the question: (.) there will be (and are) products available that attempt to optimize traffic in poorly documented and often poorly conceived ways. These can do more harm and have other mysterious effects on traffic than whatever this working group would create, since it would provide open specifications that could be developed and tested against the concerns of relevant layers and other IETF protocols, and problems and concerns could be addressed. If there are people willing to write the specs *and* people are also able to express interest in writing/deploying/selling code and products that use those specs, then we should certainly be doing this work in the IETF. This will allow: - multiple vendor boxes to interoperate on different sides of a challenged network/link (currently this is beyond the state of the art!) - simplified/standardized management of such boxes - well-understood behavior profiles of such middleboxes and their protocols algorithms If the IETF does not do this work, then I don't believe any of those three benefits/results are likely at all, and the (poor) status quo will continue. Jose
