November 8, 2007
Breaking Up, Internet2-LambdaRail Style
The end came last week, and it wasn’t pretty: Long merger talks between Internet2 and National LambdaRail, the leading high-speed networks for researchers, fell apart after a meeting of LambdaRail’s governing board.
The union that never happened has spawned dark mutterings from both sides about bad behavior, and has left universities with the unhappy prospect of having to split scarce resources between two high-performance Internet providers, instead of consolidating them.
Talks had been going on for the past eight months, often cloaked in secrecy mandated by a legal agreement between the two sides, so people familiar with the negotiations have provided information to The Chronicle on the condition that their names not be used. “But it’s bad, it’s a real train wreck,” said one chief information officer at a major university.
Erv Blythe, chairman of LambdaRail, said in a message posted on the organization’s Web site that LambdaRail had asked Internet2 for some changes in a previously approved merger document, but that Internet2’s board had declined.
“Left without the opportunity to obtain what it considered the absolute minimum but necessary changes” to the merger agreement, the board did not approve it, wrote Mr. Blythe, who is vice president for information technology at Virginia Tech.
People familiar with the document in question, however, said that one of the rules set up this past spring, when the merger talks began, was that the document not be changed. So the Internet2 board was merely abiding by those rules.
The breakdown in talks seems to center on the legal structure of National LambdaRail and some fundamental incompatibilities with the structure of Internet2. Sources have differing opinions about the legal requirements and what they mean. But given the outcome, the incompatibility of the two organizations seems one thing that is beyond dispute. —Josh Fischman
Posted on Thursday November 8, 2007 | Permalink |Comments
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I just got here from Planet Xus and have never heard of this Internet, but the story sounds a lot like when Marssca K. and Jovio K. were having a principled disagreement over Flod Canyon. You know, principled turf battle.
— S. Britchky Nov 7, 09:48 PM #
NLR was the classic case of a solution looking for a problem. It began with a vendor with excessive fiber looking for a use for that fiber not with the higher education community looking for better network connectivity for our campuses. I truly feel sorry for those organizations who put down big bucks to gain entry to NLR.
— Bill Nov 8, 05:55 PM #
Unless the previous merger document was a binding contract, stipulating that it is an unchangeable document during contractual negotiations is ridiculous.
— Colby Gutierrez-Kraybill Nov 9, 10:15 AM #