software inventory utility

A century ago, the public software inventory utility started building out a worldwide, circuit-switched network. This network consisted of fixed-bandwidth, dedicated circuits and ideally was suited to carrying real-time traffic, such as voice. Some five decades later, networking experts from military and educational environments introduced packet-switched networks to circumvent any single points of failure, common in circuit-switched networks. Packet switching chops the information flow into small chunks of data, which can be routed over independent paths to the same destination, analogous to the operation of the postal system.

The resiliency of packet-switched networks caused a shift toward connectionless communication protocols that can handle packets that might arrive out of order. However, for many data applications, this was not only complicated to design around, but it also was insufficient in meeting application needs. Thus, connection-oriented protocols such as X.25 and Systems Network Architecture (SNA), and later Frame Relay and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), were developed. In these protocols, a circuit (permanent or switched virtual circuit, PVC or SVC) is defined over the underlying connectionless packet-switched network to handle a session of communication between two software inventory utility or endpoints