Edge mania drives deals at Supercomm
By Loring Wirbel -- EE Times -- June 4, 2003 (6:35 p.m. EST)
ATLANTA — An increased obsession with edge services drove a series of alliances and business-plan shifts at this week's Supercomm 2003 here.
Driven by a statement from AT&T Chairman David Dornan that multi-service edge devices would be the primary capital expenditure even for long-distance carriers in 2003, vendors in fields ranging from edge routing to core transport quickly shifted to a concentration on edge aggregation.
London-based Marconi Corop. Plc, for example, long a specialist in core transport, signed a broad deal with edge-router vendor Laurel Networks Inc. (Pittsburgh), making the Laurel architecture central in Marconi's edge strategy. The Laurel ST200 router will be sold as the Marconi BXR-5000 edge router, meant for aggregating Sonet, ATM and Ethernet services.
Transport pioneer Ciena Corp. (Linthicum, Md.) rolled out what was perhaps a more radical new-services strategy. In it, the former Sonet platform acquired from Cyras Corp. along with the MPLS switch from WaveSmith Networks Inc. (Acton, Mass.) play central roles.
Ciena will promote itself as a provider of end-to-end service aggregation platforms, said vice president of marketing Francois Locoh-Donou, and will expand its sales program to resellers and system integrators for the first time.
Corrigent Systems Inc., a San Jose, Calif., start up using Resilient Packet Ring as a technology to develop packet-aware add-drop multiplexers, signed aggregation deals with two providers of edge access equipment for Ethernet-over-Sonet, Larscom Inc. (Milpitas, Calif.) and Overture Networks Inc. (Research Triangle Park, NC).
Nigel Cole, Corrigent's vice president of business development, said the notion of promoting packet-aware add-drop multiplexers (ADMs) became a stronger proposition when edge-access devices supported the Corrigent architecture.
A source in Cisco Systems' Cerent ADM product group said “the idea that edge-service aggregation is important is nothing new. But what's kind of odd at this show is that everyone wants to pretend they've always been dwelling at the edge, even the people who have been the leaders in core services.”
Ciena's Locoh-Donou said there the company does not intend to make carriers forget the company's wave-division multiplexing roots. But the goal of LightWorks Services is to indicate to those less familiar with Ciena that the company is a player in DWDM transport, hybrid optical-electrical switching, Sonet ADM functions and MPLS-based Layer 2 switching.
Ciena will move directly into enterprise aggregation, Locoh-Donou said, though the company still is assessing whether to develop further enterprise technology internally, or obtain externally through licensing deals or acquisitions. There is alsono intention, however, to focus directly on Ethernet switches used primarily as enterprise aggregators, Locoh-Donou said.
Cole said access devices using Ethernet-over-Sonet architectures have a big advantage over Ethernet-only switches. The latter, though they can offer impressive bandwidth and quality of service prioritization, still operate in a packet-only world, he said.
Ultimately, offering Sonet-like services under an RPR or time-division multiplexed domain offers more than moving large Ethernet switches from the enterprise, Cole said.
commsdesign.com |
