Following Wintel’s snub, the Yankee Group in August cut its forecast for the InfiniBand server market from $1.7 billion to $851 million by 2005; the company also reduced its prediction for the InfiniBand storage market that year from $450 million to $351 million. In his initial report on the technology last May, Yankee analyst Jamie Gruener made his optimism conditional on whether the market could “overcome the challenge of adopting a new technology in a challenging economic climate.” As it turns out, the market couldn’t.

While even the companies doing the shunning have nothing but kind words in public for InfiniBand, the specter of economic uncertainty is stifling the spin. “We remain very committed,” insists Allyson Klein, marketing manager for Intel’s InfiniBand initiative. Still, she acknowledges, “This is a very different market than it was a few years ago.” She cites economic reasons for her company’s decision to rely on industry partners to bring InfiniBand to the Intel platform.

Similar words sound forth from Redmond. “In the current economic climate, IT managers are gravitating toward evolutionary technologies that leverage existing infrastructure and staffing,” explains a Microsoft spokesperson. “The emphasis today is on efficiency and not expansion, incremental growth and not wholesale replacement. Ethernet is ubiquitous from the desktop to the server. Gigabit Ethernet technologies, while not as fast today as InfiniBand, are now able to address the demands of a higher range of server capabilities with no additional software or management expense.”

Perhaps InfiniBand still has a future shuttling bits in high-bandwidth data center applications, but its role now seems to be that of a pricey bit player rather than a popular rising star.