Video: New Approaches to Content Delivery and Site Acceleration

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Alvarion's Q1 Revenue Slides, Restructuring Announced

Citing WiMAX customer deployment delays, Alvarion reported Q1 2010 revenue of $51.9 million, a decrease of 13.8% from $60.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2009, and a decrease of 23.5% from $67.9 million in the first quarter of 2009. GAAP net loss in the first quarter of 2010 was ($4.9) million, or ($0.08) per share, compared to a net loss of ($1.3) million, or ($0.02) per share in Q4 2009. GAAP net loss in the first quarter of 2009 was ($0.8) million, or ($0.01) per share.


"Q1 results were within the range of our guidance and, as expected, reflect continued delays in several business catalysts," said Eran Gorev, President and CEO of Alvarion. "Meanwhile, we continued the expansion of our business with several existing customers and made important progress toward securing several major projects in Asia Pacific, EMEA and North America. The timing of actual orders is difficult to anticipate, but we hope to see some impact from these developments in 2010. We are using the delay in the business catalysts to strengthen our capabilities in order to capture a larger share of the projects once the vendor selection processes move forward."


Alvarion said it continues to see significant opportunities in the WiMAX carrier market as well as in the Enterprise space. Nevertheless, the company has launched a restructuring with the following objectives:

• Transform the company into a full-fledged solution provider by adding professional services capabilities to capture a larger share of each project



• Build key account teams to focus on larger end-to-end projects



• Expand local presence in key regions, including local manufacturing



• Implement an immediate headcount reduction of about 20% in order to reduce expenses by about $30 million on an annual basis.

"After a thorough business review, we are moving decisively to implement a two-stage plan, continued Mr. Gorev. "First, we are transforming the organization, including our cost structure, into one that will best serve our near-term strategic business objectives. These changes will allow us to more effectively focus on the right opportunities, deliver end-to-end network solutions including professional services, and, in turn, capture a larger proportion of the total project dollars than we have in the past.


"The second stage of our plan will focus on positioning Alvarion for profitable growth in the increasingly complex multi-technology environment that will evolve over the next couple of years. We intend to complete the process and begin to implement the next phase of our plan during the second half of the year."http://www.alvarion.com

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NTT America Announces U.S. Enterprise Cloud based on OpSource

NTT America has introduced an enterprise-grade, multi-tenant public cloud solution to its customers in the U.S. market. The solution leverages OpSource's cloud capabilities, the NTT Communications' Global IP Network and NTT America's highly secure data center infrastructure.


The NTT America Cloud is an extension of the company's suite of virtualization services based on the VMware virtualization platform. This provides enterprises with the ability to rapidly build, deploy and manage their own networks and servers in a highly secure environment. It supports multiple operating systems, including Windows, Red Hat and CentOS, and is backed by an industry-leading SLA which includes a 100% uptime guarantee.


Customers will have the ability to rapidly provision dedicated VLAN's; configure firewalls, deploy server environments and manage those environments from anywhere in the world. Customers can configure and turn on resources as needed, and shut them down when they are no longer required, making the solution highly scalable and cost-effective. All of this can be controlled via a self service portal or automated through an API.


Components of NTT America Cloud include: CPU Hours; RAM Hours; Storage Hours; Networks (per hour per additional network); Inbound Bandwidth (per GB); Sub-Administrators (per hour per additional admin). Services are available on a Month-To-Month, Pay-As-You-Go basis with no annual commitment. Customers may also select pre-paid monthly plans at reduced rates with overages paid on a Pay-As-You-Go basis.
http://www.us.ntt.com

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Crossbeam and Check Point Expand Strategic Partnership

Crossbeam Systems has expanded its strategic agreement with Check Point Software Technologies to offer its Security Gateway Software Blades and VSX virtualized security gateway platform with Crossbeam's X-Series security platform. By delivering it through Check Point's global channel network, customers can more easily purchase a unified solution complete with premium support. Crossbeam and Check Point are delivering fully integrated network security solutions to the large-enterprise and service-provider markets.
http://www.crossbeam.com

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Texas' Big Bend Telephone Upgrades with Occam

Big Bend Telephone Company, an independent operator headquartered in Alpine, Texas, has deployed Occam Networks' BLC 6000 MSAP to transition from copper to fiber broadband services over a single network infrastructure. Big Bend Telephone covers a territory larger than the state of Rhode Island, serving its customers with a mix of access network technologies. Using GigE and GPON technologies from the BLC 6000, Big Bend provides high-speed access to anchor institutions including rural health clinics, a local university, and regional Homeland Security offices. As part of a strategic shift to Ethernet and a fiber infrastructure, Big Bend will use the Occam BLC 6000 MSAP to deliver voice services, high-speed Internet and data back up services to residential and business customers. Financial terms were not disclosed.
http://www.bigbend.nethttp://www.occamnetworks.com

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IBM WebSphere Taps into Akamai Cloud

Akamai Technologies and IBM announced an alliance that ties the IBM WebShere software into Akamai's Web application acceleration services and global edge delivery platform. As both companies focus on cloud computing, including virtualization and distributed caching, this combined solution will provide customers elastic scalability of applications from the end user to the edge of the enterprise and all the way into the data center. As a result, customer can realize key benefits such as consistent response times even in the face of peak load demands, and greater ability to consolidate and reduce overall Web application infrastructure. The companies claim this integration enables high performance for delivering rich web applications to users all over the globe.


http://www.ibm.com/software/webspherehttp://www.akamai.com

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Sonus Networks Posts Q1 Revenue of $62 Million

Sonus Networks reported Q1 revenue of $62.4 million, compared to $68.7 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009 and $41.0 million for the first quarter of fiscal 2009. The company's net loss on a GAAP basis for the first quarter of fiscal 2010 was $0.1 million, or $0.00 per share, compared to net income of $10.3 million, or $0.04 per diluted share, for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009, and a net loss of $16.2 million, or $0.06 per share, for the first quarter of fiscal 2009.
http://www.sonusnet.com

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Ixia Tests IEEE 1588v2 and Synch-E For Mobile Backhaul

Ixia introduced an end-to-end testing solution for converged mobile backhaul networks -- from the radio base station to the mobile packet core. The test suite now include measurement for conformance validation, interoperability, precision and performance of devices and networks used for mobile backhaul, including IEEE 1588v2 and ITU-T Sync-E-based time synchronization standards. These two new timing protocol standards enable mobile voice traffic to be carried over Ethernet backhaul link while maintaining network synchronization.


Ixia said its new IEEE 1588v2 and ITU-T Sync-E synchronization protocol support enables network equipment manufacturers and service providers to ensure the functionality, scale, and performance of their timing protocol implementation, which are needed for wireless mobile backhaul. Ixia's solutions cover a full spectrum of Carrier Ethernet testing needs, including standardized Metro Ethernet Forum tests standardized such as MEF 9, 14, 21, 24, and 25.


"With the increase in data, video, and voice traffic from mobile devices and skyrocketing numbers of mobile broadband subscribers, mobile network operators are choosing IP and Ethernet to stay ahead of bandwidth demands. This effectively is unifying the wired and wireless services over a common technology infrastructure," said Joe Zeto, Ixia Senior Marketing Evangelist. "Ixia's converged IP platform and test solution allows our customers to completely validate their deployments and upgrades before going live, guaranteeing that their networks are properly provisioned and ready for prime-time."http://www.ixiacom.com

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Cotendo Raises $12 Million for Site Acceleration

Cotendo, a start-up based in Sunnyvale, California, secured $12 million in new venture funding for its site acceleration service. Cotendo's CDN and Site Acceleration Suite includes high-performance acceleration of dynamic and static content, intelligent load balancing, performance monitoring, real-time reporting, etc.


The company's proprietary software acts as a "pump" to speed the delivery of small objects on website. This approach accelerates performance of high-volume transactional sites, such as eCommerce, social networking, etc. Unlike other content delivery networks offering site acceleration services, Cotendo has not focused on the video aspect of content distribution but rather on the smaller static and dynamic parts.


The new funding round was led by Tenaya Capital and joined by its current investors -- Sequoia Capital and Benchmark Capital. The company plans to use the money to scale its domestic and international service, as well as accelerate the development of new technology.


Cotendo recently opened a local presence in France and Germany. In addition, the company has added several new customers to its rapidly growing US customer roster in the last few months. These include Digg, Meebo, Payoneer and Adbrite.


http://www.cotendo.com

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Extreme Networks Develops Ethernet Service Engineering

Leveraging intellectual property acquired from Soapstone Networks, Extreme Networks introduced new service engineering capabilities that push the boundaries of what is possible with point-and-click provisioning systems.
The company's new Ridgeline Service Advisor management software aims to advance a carrier's service support from simple, reactive circuit monitoring to a more proactive service management approach. The goal is to accelerate the provisioning of new services, enhance subscriber experience through visual service monitoring, and increase network efficiency by simplifying service engineering.


The management capabilities in Ridgeline Service Advisor, which will be extended across Extreme's portfolio of Summit series and BlackDiamond series Ethernet Transport switches, provide a graphical representation of the network coupled with point-and-click provisioning. Ridgeline Service Advisor automates service provisioning by replacing the command line interface commonly used for provisioning services and replacing it with visual software that automatically translates menu-based commands and mouse-clicks to switch specific instructions for multiple network switches at the same time. This capability ensures that services such as residential triple play aggregation, MEF Certified Business Ethernet services, Ethernet mobile backhaul, and wholesale services can be provisioned faster and more accurately.


In addition, Ridgeline Service Advisor provides visual service monitoring that displays service status and the active path of the service through the unified graphical interface. Currently, such path information usual resides in a series of configuration files on discrete switches. Ridgeline Service Advisor also automates the provisioning of Ethernet Automatic Protection Switching (EAPS) for resilient Ethernet rings by providing point-and-click provisioning of resilient EAPS domains.


"Service providers understand that advanced service management software is a powerful way to help monetize their network and differentiation their offering," said Mark Showalter, senior director of service provider marketing and business development at Extreme Networks. "We are delighted to add Ridgeline Service Advisor to our portfolio of high-performance Ethernet Transport products that help carriers increase the longevity of their network, increase subscriber loyalty, and lower the long term cost of operating next-generation broadband networks."


Extreme Networks Ridgeline Service Advisor has a targeted release of the third quarter 2010 with a beginning list US price of $19,995 for 20 nodes.

Staying Competitive By Managing Services, Not Just Circuits by Mark Showalter The challenge facing metro network planners is to find the most cost-effective way to deliver profitable services in the near-term while deploying a network flexible enough to support an array of new services in the future. Here's a quick look at MPLS, VPLS, and metro Ethernet Transport.

http://www.extremenetworks.com

• In August 2009, Extreme Networks acquired the software assets of Soapstone Networks. The transaction transferred ownership of the Soapstone Networks software control plane and service aware provisioning system, enabling Extreme Networks to simplify the service provider's job of provisioning and maintaining Ethernet services for their subscribers.

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BLADE Debuts Top-of-Rack FCoE Switch

BLADE Network Technologies introduced a Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) top-of-rack switch. BLADE's RackSwitch G8124, which is a 24-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch, now includes new lossless CEE enhancements with BLADEOS 6.3 for high-performance IP storage and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) at no extra charge. BLADE's RackSwitch G8124 is also the first to break the $500 per 10 Gigabit Ethernet port barrier for a CEE-capable switch.


BLADE said its RackSwitch supports the IEEE's Data Center Bridging (DCB) standards for high-performance Ethernet with no packet loss, enabling its use in emerging FCoE environments as well as for IP storage environments that employ iSCSI or NAS.


BLADE's VMready VM-aware networking technology enables it use in Virtual Machine (VM) environments as well. BLADE's VMready enables the unique identification and network configuration for each Virtual Machine. VMready tracks VMs as they migrate and reconfigures the network in real-time to ensure security and access is always maintained.
http://www.bladenetwork.net

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