Linux Foundation Launches Open Platform for NFV Project

The Linux Foundation is launching the Open Platform for NFV Project (OPNFV) with the goal of accelerating the commercial introduction of NFV products and services. OPNFV will establish a carrier-grade, integrated, open source reference platform that industry peers will build together to advance the evolution of NFV and ensure consistency, performance and interoperability among multiple open source components. Because multiple open source NFV building...

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AT&T: 2 Million Connected Cars and Growing Fast

AT&T told a group of investors that it expects meaningful subscriber growth for its connected car services in the next three-to-five years. As of today, AT&T provides either wholesale or retail connectivity (“connected cars”) to nearly 2 million U.S. registered passenger vehicles with about 500,000 added in the third quarter. In 2015, AT&T expects to connect nearly half of new wireless-connected U.S. passenger vehicles and the company...

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Oracle is Just Getting Started in Clouds: 19 of Top 20 SaaS Apps

Oracle is just getting started in the cloud, said Larry Ellison in a keynote address at Oracle Open World 2014 in San Francisco, but already almost every major enterprise SaaS application is built upon the Oracle database.  This includes Salesforce.com, Ariba, SuccessFactors, NetSuite and many others. This give Oracle “the largest portfolio of applications [in the cloud] of anybody". Oracle’s cloud infrastructure consists of over 30,000 server...

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Windstream Cranks Up its 100G Long-haul Express Net with Infinera

Windstream has begun deployment of phase two of its 100G long-haul express network, which leverages Infinera’s optical transport platform. Windstream operates a nationwide fiber and IP network as well as 27 data centers. Phase two of the 100G long-haul express network rollout covers about 4,100 miles and is scheduled to be complete by year’s end. It includes routes from Chicago to Omaha, Kansas City and St. Louis; Cleveland to Albany, N.Y.; Boston,...

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Alcatel-Lucent Invests in Ikanos for G.fast

Ikanos Communications announced that Tallwood Venture Capital and Alcatel-Lucent are purchasing $11.25 million and $5.0 million, or approximately 27.4 million and 12.2 million shares, of the company’s common stock, respectively, at $0.41 per share for aggregate gross proceeds of $16.25 million. Alcatel-Lucent has committed to loan the company up to $10.0 million, subject to the terms of the loan agreement.  Tallwood has also agreed to purchase...

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Ceragon Receives Follow-on Orders from Global Tier 1 Operator

Ceragon Networks announced the receipt of follow-on orders from a global Tier 1 operator serving 20 countries across Asia and Africa. This latest upgrade of both African and Asian subsidiaries brings the total order value to over $50 million year to date. Ceragon said its Evolution Long-Haul solution is being used in to expand the operator’s mobile reach across eight national markets. In Asia, Ceragon’s all-out-door expertise and FibeAir solutions...

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Dell'Oro: Worldwide Carrier CAPEX to Decline $6B in 2015

Worldwide telecom carrier CAPEX is forecast to decline by $6 billion in 2015, according to a newly published Carrier Economics report by Dell'Oro Group.  The expected decline follows growth rate in the mid-single digits for 1H 2014. Double-digit growth in mobile network infrastructure significantly outpaced the low single-digit growth in service revenues. "While we maintain our view that worldwide Capex will grow around 3% in 2014, we believe...

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Dell’Oro: Network Security Appliance Market Grows 4% Q/Q

The Network Security Appliance market grew four percent quarter-over-quarter, according to a new report from Dell'Oro Group.  Gains were recorded in both Physical and Virtual Appliances as new threats, the necessity of protecting network assets, and the priority of mitigating the risks associated with attacks continued to drive demand. The market also saw a change in vendor rankings in the second quarter 2014 as Fortinet’s strong sales into...

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Accenture and Alcatel-Lucent Form Customer Care Alliance

Accenture and Alcatel-Lucent announced a strategic alliance to design, build and run scalable, cost effective customer care operations for all-IP networks. A new Accenture Alcatel-Lucent Business Group will be formed with dedicated sales and delivery resources.  The solutions will be based on Alcatel-Lucent’s Motive line of products.  The new Group will also explore small cell wireless network solutions with a focus on integrating cellular...

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Microsoft India to Offer Local Azure and Office365 Cloud Services

Microsoft will offer commercial cloud services - Azure and Office 365, from local data centers in India by the end of 2015. The company said local cloud facilities will ensure data sovereignty within India, lower latency and geo redundancy. “Microsoft is deeply committed to helping people and organizations thrive in our mobile-first and cloud-first world - that’s why we are proud to offer our commercial cloud services through datacenters in India,”...

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Cisco's Intercloud Expands Reach

Cisco has formed Intercloud partnerships with Deutsche Telekom, BT, Equinix, NTT Data and over 30 additional companies, demonstrating significant momentum behind its strategy to bring programmable networking to the interconnection of private and public clouds. Cisco now aims to bring its Intercloud fabric into 250 of the top co-location data centers worldwide in the coming months, significantly advancing its goal of making Intercloud the leading...

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Interview: Cisco Builds its Intercloud

Six month after unveiling its Intercloud strategy, Cisco announced 30 new partners, including Deutsche Telekom, BT, Equinix and NTT Data. In this interview, Fabio Gori, Director, WW Cloud Marketing at Cisco, discusses: 00:04 - What is the Intercloud? 01:12 - Is the Intercloud really gaining market traction? 02:54 - Whats the real business value for Cisco Intercloud partners? 04:05 - What is Cisco doing to accelerate adoption of Intercloud? 05:21...

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Cisco and Equinix Team Up on Intercloud to Cloud Exchange

Cisco and Equinix will jointly develop enterprise customer solutions that utilize Cisco’s Intercloud technologies and the Equinix Cloud Exchange to deliver more secure, resilient and efficient interconnection to public clouds.  The non-exclusive partnership aims to extend connectivity from the application layer through data center networking system to enable a seamless experience between public cloud services, such as AWS and Microsoft Azure,...

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Interview: Cisco's Intercloud Meets the Equinix Cloud Exchange

Equinix will deploy Cisco's Intercloud capabilities in the Equinix Cloud Exchange, enabling native connectivity between the Cisco ecosystem and all of the third-party cloud services available via Equinix, including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.  Cisco Cloud Services will also become available in the Equinix Cloud Exchange. In this interview, Ihab Tarazi discusses: 0:05 - About the Equinix Cloud Exchange 0:57 - Highlights of the...

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OpenDaylight's Helium Delivers Better SDN/NFV Interoperability

The OpenDaylight Project, which is the community-led and industry-supported open source platform to advance SDN and NFV, officially released Helium, its second generation open source software code. Helium features 11 new protocols, applications and technologies for creating interoperability across software-defined networks. Some highlights: A new user interface provides a much simpler and customizable installation process. The use of the Apache...

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Oracle Adds Big Data and Mobile Cloud Services

Oracle introduced six new Oracle Cloud Platform services that help customers and partners develop and deploy new applications, extend and personalize Oracle SaaS applications, and migrate existing on-premises applications to Oracle Cloud. New functionality targets big data analytics, integration, process management, Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE), and Node.js for server-side JavaScript. The new services are: Oracle Big Data Cloud: Enables...

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Ericsson to acquire GEOSS Consulting Firm

Ericsson agreed to acquire GEOSS, an operations support systems (OSS) consulting company based in Germany. Financial terms were not disclosed. GEOSS’ core competencies include consultancy, systems development, systems integration and operational support. The company, which has presence in Darmstadt, Düsseldorf, Munich and Stuttgart, specializes in creating and developing high-performance solutions for the configuration and monitoring of IP networks...

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Centurylink Inks Data Center Deal with China's Neusoft

CenturyLink announced an agreement with Neusoft, a leading IT solutions and services provider in China, enabling it to extend its global managed hosting services in China. CenturyLink customers can now access a comprehensive portfolio of managed hosting, security, cloud and networking solutions through a Shanghai data center. "For multinational corporations looking to grow their customer base, entering China presents enormous opportunities and...

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Christopher Young to Head Intel's Security Division

Christopher Young has been appointed Intel's newest senior vice president and general manager of Intel Security. Young will join Intel's management committee and report to Intel President Renée James. Young comes to Intel from Cisco, where he was senior vice president of the global Security and Government Group, responsible for strategy, engineering and product development for the company's security product business. Prior to Cisco, he held executive...

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Fujitsu Introduces its BroadOne GX4000

In this sponsored video, Fujitsu introduces its BroadOne GX4000 Multi-Gigabit Wireless Transport System for the North American market.  This E-band solution operates in the 70 / 80 GHz frequency band and uses Fujitsu's “Impulse Radio” technology to enable an ultra-high data rate of 3 Gbps for a wireless link. It provides wireless CPRI transport for cellular fronthaul. ...

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Microsoft Chops Azure Prices, Including ExpressRoute

Microsoft announced significant price cuts on several of its Azure cloud computing services, including its ExpressRoute connectivity option. Azure ExpressRoute ensures private connections between Azure data centers and on-premise infrastructure or colocation facilities by using an MPLS VPN or other secure tunnel. As of late July, Azure ExpressRoute partners included AT&T, Equinix (7 locations running), Level 3 (EVPL service and IP VPN service),...

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HP to Open SDN App Store

On October 1, HP will open an "SDN App Store" to provide its ecosystem partners a go-to-market platform to uncover the business value of SDN.  The online store will also feature HP's consulting and support services. To help customers easily navigate the HP SDN App Store, HP will offer four different categories of applications defined by their support and test process: The HP Circle, with applications built and tested exclusively by HP. The...

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BT Tests G.fast in Adastral Park Lab

BT's Adastral Park R&D centre in Ipswich is conducting trials of G.fast technology in conjunction with Fibre To The Distribution Point (FTTdp) architecture. Initial testing achieved downstream speeds of around 800 Mbps over a 19m length of copper, combined with upstream speeds of more than 200 Mbps. Speeds of around 700/200 Mbps were also achieved over longer lines of 66m. BT said its fibre network rollout, which is being carried out by Openreach,...

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Telefónica and Huawei Sign MoU

Telefónica and Huawei announced a collaboration agreement focused on three areas: Transformation of Telefónica's new-generation networks, including 4G/5G networks, 400G, FTTX, SDN IP/Optical networks and technology for the connected home.  Development and adaptation of IT solutions to improve Telefónica's business processes and improve its customers' experience. Creation of an efficient technical solution for the virtualization of certain...

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Intel to Invest Up to US$1.5B in China's Tsinghua Unigroup

Intel plans to invest up to RMB 9 billion (US$1.5 billion) in Tsinghua Unigroup, a Chinese state-owned company administered by Tsinghua University, with the goal of expanding the adoption of Intel-based mobile devices.   Intel will work with Tsinghua Unigroup to jointly develop Intel Architecture and communications-based solutions for mobile phones. Under the agreement, Intel will acquire a minority stake of approximately 20 percent of the...

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Vertical Systems Group: 1 Million Carrier Ethernet Ports in U.S. by '18

Customer installations of Carrier Ethernet services in the U.S. will reach one million ports in 2018, according to new @Ethernet research from Vertical Systems Group. The projected figure includes all retail Ethernet services at speeds ranging from sub-10 Mbps to more than 10 Gbps. “U.S. market demand for business-class Carrier Ethernet services is solid. Enterprises and SMBs will make purchase decisions to deploy hundreds of thousands of new...

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Rackspace Launches Managed OpenStack Private Cloud

Rackspace launched a new Private Cloud service powered by OpenStack. The Rackspace Private Cloud, which is designed for enterprise production workloads, includes a 99.99 percent OpenStack API uptime guarantee, increased scalability to hundreds of nodes and DevOps automation services for application lifecycle management. In addition, hybrid customers have the ability to burst into the public cloud by using RackConnect to securely connect the customer’s...

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Interoute Strikes "Patch Tax" Fees, Opens Canary Wharf Data Centre

Interoute opened the doors of its new London data centre and announced that any customers using its data centres and colocation facilities across Europe will not be subjected to the standard industry practice of recurring colocation patch costs. Interoute describes these recurring costs for static cables as a "Patch Tax". The company estimates that currently business in the UK spend between £70 and £100 million a year on recurring patch charges. Interoute's...

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Colt Activates Dublin-to-London Fiber Route

Colt announced activation of a new, fully operational network route from Dublin to London via Manchester. This is the second high bandwidth route on the Colt network linking Dublin to London. The Dublin to London route via Manchester follows the launch of Colt’s low latency route from Dublin to London via Birmingham. This latest expansion completes a network ring that links the two capital cities and connects hundreds of Ireland-based companies...

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NTT Electronics Ships 20 nm 100G Coherent PHY

NTT Electronics began shipping a new 20nm 100G coherent digital signal processor (DSP) for long-haul and metro transport systems. Broadcom confirmed the device is using its high performance 20 nanometer (nm) signal processing enhanced mixed signal technologies. Designed in collaboration with NTT Electronics (NEL), the low-power 100G coherent PHY allows the use of a DSP within lower power and smaller second generation coherent 100G modules, including...

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Telstra Expands Presence in Equinix Data Centers

Telstra will expand its data center connectivity with Equinix with two new Australia data center deployments in SY3, the most densely connected data center in Australia, and Melbourne’s ME1, Equinix’s first International Business Exchange (IBX) data center at the heart of Australia’s second largest city. Telstra is also deployed with Equinix in Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo and Sydney. Through our global and domestic deployments in Equinix data...

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Cisco Opens Global Support Center in Dalian, China

Cisco inaugurated a Global Support Center in Dalian, China. Cisco Global Support Center Dalian will enable Cisco to provide 24/7 technical support and services for customers in countries including China, Korea, Japan and Russia. The center currently provides services in languages including English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean and Japanese. Others such as Russian and Asian languages will be added over time. Dalian has always been one of the most...

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Blueprint: The Third Network

by Nan Chen, MEF President The Internet is everywhere, and available on-demand – but it offers no service guarantees, and leaves security to the user. CE 2.0 delivers assured performance and security levels – but it can take weeks to establish a service. The world needs a THIRD Network.   In 2012, Ethernet bandwidth for business overtook all legacy WAN technologies, and it continues to surge ahead – Fig 1 ...

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