Extreme Announces Preliminary Results

Extreme Networks now expects revenue for its 2011 fiscal third quarter ended March 27, 2011 to be $75.5-76.5 million.


"The revenue for the quarter was impacted by the deferral of $2.6 million in product revenue for a large customer and the timing of several large and relatively complex customer transactions," said Oscar Rodriguez, President & CEO of Extreme Networks. "We expect to be able to complete our obligations under these deals in future quarters, which will represent additional revenue for Extreme Networks at that time. In addition, we have begun to execute on our stated strategic company transformation, and have announced new products and are consolidating our product portfolio to reduce expense and eliminate under-performing or obsolete products. As a result, we experienced some customer purchase decision delays, as we worked to transition our customers to new products and architectures. Other factors impacting this quarter's results were a relative slowdown in our EMEA sales and longer sales cycles for business in the U.S., and increased competitive pressures related to customers in the horizontal enterprise IT market."


Overall Asia Pacific performed well, and is expected to show double-digit revenue growth from Q3 FY10. EMEA is expected to show low single digit revenue growth from Q3 FY10. North America is expected to show a decrease in revenue from Q3 FY10. Overall, year-to-date revenue growth is expected to be 9% to 10% vs. the same period in FY2010. http://www.extremenetworks.com

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Orange Business and Tata expand Telepresence

Orange Business Services announced an interoperability agreement with Tata Communications to allow customers to conduct Telepresence meetings seamlessly on each respective network. The collaboration will provide customers of each organization with open access to connect across a much broader business ecosystem.


Meetings can take place between Orange's Telepresence Community customers and any private or public room on the Tata Communications Global Meeting Exchange, and vice versa. Tata Communications currently has the largest global network of public Telepresence rooms and is present in 31 major cities across five continents, with its 33 rooms spanning 17 countries.
http://www.orange.com

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China Unicom Anhui Selects NSN's Energy Solutions

China Unicom's subsidiary in Anhui province will deploy Nokia Siemens Networks' Energy Solutions including cooling box and battery cooling cabinet to replace more costly air conditioning units. The solution can help lower average ambient temperatures to reduce the dependency on expensive air-conditioning reducing total power consumption.


Nokia Siemens Networks said its Energy Solutions provide a comprehensive approach to reduce energy consumption in telecom networks, which accounts for 86% of the total energy consumed by operators or 10%-30% of network operating expenditure. It helps operators achieve reduced energy bills while contributing positively to environmental sustainability and helps them meet their corporate social responsibility objectives.
http://www.nsn.com

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thePlatform Integrates Microsoft's Smooth Streaming

thePlatform, a leading white-label video management and publishing company, has integrated Microsoft's leading digital media technologies, including Microsoft PlayReady and Internet Information Services (IIS) Smooth Streaming. The companies said their integration enables premium video providers to deliver protected, high-definition (HD) Web video for both in-home and remote viewing experiences using the Microsoft streaming technology.


IIS Smooth Streaming is a form of dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP for delivering live and on-demand content that adjusts video quality automatically and scales massively on content distribution networks. It provides a high-quality viewing experience, which can lead to longer engagement times and makes possible the delivery of full HD 1080p media experiences.


thePlatform is also using Transform Manager, which is a server-side transformation engine built into IIS Media Services, to streamline production workflow for content companies by enabling solutions such as encoding once and simultaneously delivering multiple formats.


Comcast is the first company to combine Microsoft PlayReady and IIS Smooth Streaming technology with thePlatform's video management services. This is being done as part of Comcast's Xfinity TV service, which is available online through the company's popular Xfinity TV app. The technologies are integrated as part of the On Demand video streaming feature on the iPad.
http://www.microsoft.com

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Zixi Raises $4 million for Online VOD Software

Zixi, a start-up based in Waltham, MA, raised $4 million in new funding for its solutions for broadcast-quality HDTV globally over the cloud.



Zixi's software maximizes network bandwidth, minimizes startup delay and eliminates buffering, without sacrificing quality or altering business or operational processes. The company said its solution enables zero packet loss, split-second latency, a mere three to four percent overhead on available network bandwidth, 24/7 always-on performance, and rapid, scalable and carrier-grade deployments.



Broadcasters use Zixi to transmit video in Full-HD to multiple locations globally over the Internet. Internet video-on-demand services use Zixi to deliver instant, un-interrupted and best-quality HD videos to consumers' HDTVs, connected entertainment devices, mobile smart phones, tablets and PCs. Enterprises use Zixi to securely telecast collaborative HD video conferences to multiple locations worldwide in real-time with lower infrastructure costs.



The new funding was led by Boston-based private investment firm Schooner Capital . Industry veterans Sidney Topol, former chairman and CEO of Scientific Atlanta, and Maurice "Reese" Schonfeld, co-founder and first chief executive of CNN and the founder and former president of Food Network, invested alongside Schooner Capital.http://www.zixi.com

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Level 3's Acquisition of Global Crossing Builds Scale

Level 3 Communications will acquire Global Crossing in a stock-for-stock transaction valued at approximately $3.0 billion. Global Crossing shareholders will receive 16 shares of Level 3 common stock for each share of Global Crossing common stock or preferred stock that is owned at closing.



The combined company will operate fiber optic networks on three continents, connected by extensive undersea facilities. The combined network will serve a worldwide customer set with owned network in more than 50 countries and connections to more than 70 countries. The combined Level 3 + Global Crossing had pro forma combined 2010 revenues of $6.26 billion and pro forma combined 2010 Adjusted EBITDA of $1.27 billion before synergies and $1.57 billion after expected synergies. The customer profiles includes enterprise, government, wholesale, content, and web-based companies.



"This is a transformational combination that we believe will deliver significant value to the investors, customers and employees of both Level 3 and Global Crossing," said Jim Crowe, chief executive officer of Level 3. "The complementary fit between the two companies' networks, service portfolios and customers is compelling. By leveraging the respective strengths and extensive reach of both companies, we are creating a highly efficient and more extensive global platform that is well-positioned to meet the local and international needs of our customers."



Global Crossing's largest shareholder is Singapore Technologies Telemedia, which is supporting the merger.http://www.level3.com http://www.globalcrossing.comIn December 2003, Singapore Technologies Telemedia (ST Telemedia) consummated a strategic investment in Global Crossing, enabling a newly restructured Global Crossing to emerge from Chapter 11 proceedings. ST Telemedia invested $250 million in Global Crossing for a 61.5% equity share of the company. As a result of the bankruptcy process, Global Crossing's long-term debt and convertible preferred stock was reduced from roughly $11 billion at the end of 2001, including approximately $1 billion of Asia Global Crossing debt, to $200 million of debt post-emergence in December 2003.

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Cortina Debuts 2nd Gen 40G OTN Processor

Cortina Systems is now sampling its second generation 40G/10G optical transport processor family, CS604x, designed for transport and aggregation of data, voice, and video signals simultaneously over 10G, 40G, and 100G networks.



Cortina said its updated processor is aimed at the growing adoption of 40G Ethernet transport, as these trunks will require the cost-efficient aggregation of 10G connections. Recent OTN standards ratification for GMP mapping and ODU0 and OTN Switching will accelerate this trend. Cortina has integrated jitter attenuation and cleanup PLLS to help in a variety of applications, including packet optical transport platforms, DWDM transport systems, Carrier Ethernet switch/routers, and submarine line termination systems.



The new CS604x family retains pin for pin and software compatibility with the company's previous generation, CS600x, and adds support for latest OTN mapping standards, ODUFlex, and 40G Ethernet. It offers four additional 10G multi-rate serial interfaces for direct connection to QSFO and CFP 40G modules.



"Telecom equipment makers are looking for integrated solutions that reduce their BOM cost, board space, and power consumption, while supporting the latest standards and technologies enabling them to transport legacy and emerging packet-oriented services transparently," said Arun Zarabi, Vice President, Infrastructure Business Unit, Cortina. "The Cortina CS604x four jitter attenuation and cleanup PLLS provide significant savings to customers in both board space and cost in asynchronous demapping applications, when compared to external PLL based solutions needed with competitor products."



The Cortina CS604x Optical Transport Processor & FEC Devices integrate 40G Ethernet MAC enabling monitoring and mapping of 40GE clients to OTN, compliant with latest G.709 (Amendment 1 7/2010) & G.798 (10/2010) standards updates for GMP mapping of various bit rate clients into OTN, four integrated jitter attenuation and clean up PLLs, and additional 4x10G multi-rate (OTL/STL/XLAUI) serial interfaces enabling single chip/single card design for CFP/QFSP to CFP/300-pin MSA transponder applications.



As with the previous generation, these devices support standard and strong Forward Error Correction (FEC) at 10G & 40G rates, and provide performance monitoring and networking support for various client signals including 10GE LAN/WAN, Fibre Channel, Infiniband, and SONET/SDH with connectivity to XFP/SFP+ and SFI4.1 MSA modules. http://www.cortina-systems.com

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Eircom Deploys RAD Demarc Devices

Eircom has deployed fiber demarcation devices from RAD Data Communications to deliver symmetric Ethernet services to businesses across Ireland at speeds up to 1 Gbps.



RAD's ETX-202A is a fully featured demarcation device that provides transport demarcation to Layer 3 business services such as IP VPN, VoIP and dedicated Internet access over native Ethernet access with high reliability and management. Similarly, RAD's Ethernet in the First Mile (EFM) solution, the LA-210 DSL termination unit, will be rolled out across the eircom network later in the year to provide a copper-based solution for symmetric Ethernet delivery where fiber is not available or practical.



The RAD equipment is being supplied by The Kenton Group, a RAD Data Communications partner in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland.http://www.rad.com

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Altair Raises $26 Million for its LTE Silicon

Altair Semiconductor, a start-up based in Israel, has completed a $26 million round of funding for its ultra-low power, small footprint and high performance LTE chipsets.



Over the last year, Altair launched the first commercial LTE product in Poland, the world's first Band 12 LTE solution and the first Digital Dividend LTE router in Germany. The company has completed interoperability testing with numerous tier-one infrastructure vendors around the world, and with an LTE platform that is one of the world's only solutions that offers both TDD and FDD capabilities.



The new funding was led by Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP). All of Altair's existing investors, including BRM, Bessemer Venture Partners, Giza Venture Capital and Pacific Technology participated in the round.



"As we rapidly expand our footprint in LTE markets around the world, this capital will allow us to continue to provide our customers with the support they need to deploy and commercialize our technology," said Oded Melamed, Co-Founder and CEO of Altair. "As the global LTE market is expected to grow exponentially over the next few years, the funding will help Altair expand our current market leadership position, as well as step up the production of our chipsets in response to the increasing demand from our customers."http://www.altair-semi.com/

• In February, Altair Semiconductor announced that its TD-LTE chipset, alongside Alcatel-Lucent's LTE infrastructure, has successfully completed interoperability (IOT) testing and will take part in several upcoming TD-LTE field trials in India and China. TD-LTE operates in unpaired spectrum.

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Mu Dynamics Stress Tests Application-aware Networks

Mu Dynamics is turning up its ability to stress test application performance across networks in real time.



The company is expanding its "Mu TestCloud"-- an online collaborative community for the sharing of test assets -- to include thousands of downloadable, ready-to-run, application-specific tests. Mu's solution gives service providers and equipment vendors the ability to immediately recreate and accurately test network policies using real application flows. More importantly, Mu enables these companies to start testing immediately, instead of months later. Mu has also added a multi-track capability allowing different application mixes to be run concurrently to emulate the production environment.



Mu said many carriers and their equipment vendors are incorporating "application awareness" into their products and services to enable a far more granular classification and control of application traffic.



As an example, service providers can use Mu to test the policies governing their networks for specific Web and mobile applications, including P2P (such as BitTorrent), streaming video (such as Netflix and Hulu), social media (such as Facebook and Twitter), games (such as Farmville and Mafia Wars), and instant messaging (such as Skype and Google Chat).



"With the continued growth in the number of new applications, and the constant shift in the production mix based on popularity, today's networks are becoming more intelligent and capable of distinguishing applications," said Dave Kresse, CEO, Mu Dynamics. "Service providers are using this visibility to implement finer-grained policies around security and quality of service than were previously possible. Mu gives customers a quick and simple way to test their network policies by recreating in real time their ever-changing application mix. The results for our customers have been consistent - dramatically accelerated testing cycles, increased testing accuracy and the ability to test any application at any time."http://www.mudynamics.com

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Cisco CRS-3 Adds Packet Transport Blades, Customer Traction

In its first year, the Cisco CRS-3 Carrier Routing System has racked up 80 customers, putting it on a faster adoption pace than the original CRS-1 platform.



Cisco is now adding new capabilities to the CRS-3 platform, expanding its addressable market while reducing the cost for service providers to deliver packet-transport services.



Flexible Packet Transport -- the Cisco CRS-3 flexible packet-transport capability is a form of label switching enabled with the addition of a blade to the Cisco CRS platform. Packet-transport expands broadens the platform's reach into new markets while protecting service providers' current investments in the core. It also complements the Cisco Carrier-Grade IPv6 functionality and data center capabilities like Network Positioning System (NPS), cloud VPN, and classical Internet Protocol/Multiprotocol Label Switching routing.



Significant Savings -- because the flexible packet-transport capability does not require a new standalone product to be deployed in a network, operators can add the capability to existing CRS-3 networks without expensive, time-consuming qualification testing. Competitive solutions require three platforms to deliver the same functionality as the Cisco CRS-3, which lowers the total cost of ownership for capital expenses by over 40 percent.



Both AT&T and Comcast have now deployed the CRS-3 with 100 Gbps interfaces in production networks.



Another interesting note -- to date, Cisco has shipped 7.5 petabits per second of core bandwidth capacity to CRS platform worldwide, enough core bandwidth to support a basic video conference call with every person on earth simultaneously.http://www.cisco.com

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Verizon Unveils Content-to-Consumer Media Service

Verizon is launching a Digital Media Service for delivering live and on-demand personalized content to any type of consumer device at large scale.



Verizon Digital Media Services aims to automate previously manual workflow processes associated with formatting, managing and delivering digital media. The goal is to help content owners and digital retailers to more effectively produce, manage and distribute premium programming to consumers when, how and where they want to view it. Verizon will handle the content management and distribution challenges. Customers could include studios, networks and other content owners. Turner Broadcasting, Hearst Magazines and The Associated Press will be among the first to test Verizon Digital Media Services' capabilities.



Verizon said it can change the economics of content delivery by leveraging its network resources and providing an end-to-end solution from media ingestion to individualized unicast delivery.

The majority of technology for this Digital Media platform will be developed in-house. The carrier is also strategically teaming with Technicolor and leading technology software and hardware companies to support advanced capabilities for its automated content-to-consumer solution.



Other vendors contributing to the Verizon Digital Media Services offering include Motorola, which is providing advanced software that enables media transformation and automated workflow management; Alcatel-Lucent, which is enabling content delivery and adaptive streaming technology for unicast; and HP, which is providing high-performance ProLiant server technology.



"Verizon is creating a first-of-its-kind automated digital utility," said Mike Millegan, president of Global Wholesale. "With this unique delivery platform, built on top of Verizon's high-IQ infrastructure, content owners, entertainment companies and digital media retailers will be able to create new business models that capitalize and deliver on the promise of digital entertainment."http://www.verizondigitalmediaservices.com

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Cotendo's Cloudlet Accelerates Dynamic Content in the Cloud

Cotendo, a start-up Content Delivery Network (CDN) and Value-Added Site Acceleration services provider, introduced its "Cloudlet" Platform, which helps content providers to push business logic for Web content applications into the cloud and much closer to the end user.



Cotendo said its Cloudlet paradigm will solve the challenge of quickly and efficiently delivering personalized web pages and device-specific content. This type of highly customized content typically cannot leverage the power of traditional content delivery network and site acceleration feature because each page must be generated individually.



Cotendo's Cloudlet offers the capability to generate and deliver intelligent and real-time adaptive locally cached dynamic assets that can be content-aware (e.g. cookies), device specific, and selective by context (e.g. user's location). This includes the ability for granular authentication and contextual, personalized application delivery, which enterprises could leverage for serving content to employees and partners around the globe.



Cotendo also sees an opportunity for its Cloudlet to serve content to mobile devices. Cloudlet promises the ability to deliver location and device-aware information on an as-needed basis while simultaneously reducing their origin server calls by 90%.



Cloudlet will integrate with other Cotendo content delivery, site acceleration and Web performance optimization offerings. It does not require code alternations to websites or applications.









Presented by Ido Safruti, Cotendohttp://www.cotendo.com

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Dynamic Content, Clouds, and CDNs

Content delivery trends are shifting. Websites need to bemore dynamic, which makes it harder to cache content. One solution is to push business logic closer to the edge and into the CDN cloud.



Presented by Ido Safruti, Cotendohttp://www.cotendo.com

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