Ciena delivers strong Q2, increases guidance

Citing continued market share gains and favorable industry dynamics, Ciena reported strong revenue and earnings for its fiscal second quarter ended April 30, 2019, beating market expectations. Q2 revenue amounted to $865.0 million, increasing 18.5% year over year, while Q2 net income per share amounted to $0.33 GAAP and $0.48 adjusted (non-GAAP). Ciena also increased its outlook for fiscal-third-quarter revenue to be in the range of $915 million to $945 million. Full year growth is now projected to be 13%-14% year over year, up from previous guidance in the 6%-8% range.

"Today we reported very strong quarterly performance, including continued market share gains, driven by our technology leadership and diversified customer base in high growth markets," said Gary Smith, President and CEO, Ciena. "We are entering the second half with strong visibility and increased confidence for the full fiscal year supported by favorable industry dynamics and growing competitive advantage."

On an investor conference call, Ciena executives said demand for capacity is robust and that the competitive landscape of the industry is being redefined as major carriers reassess their vendor choices. Regarding global trade tensions, Ciena has no revenue exposure to China. However, the company has seen some carrier seek to reduce their dependence on certain Chinese vendors.

https://investor.ciena.com/news/press-release-details/2019/Ciena-Reports-Fiscal-Second-Quarter-2019-Financial-Results/default.aspx

https://s22.q4cdn.com/890175405/files/doc_presentations/2019/06/Q219_Earnings_Presentation_PostCall_draft.pdf

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Google to acquire Looker for cloud analytics

Google agreed to acquire Looker, a start-up with a platform for business intelligence, data applications and embedded analytics, for $2.6 billion in cash.

The Looker platform integrates data at web scale. The company claims 1,700 customers, including Amazon, Etsy, IBM, Kickstarter, Lyft, Sony, Spotify and The Economist. Looker is headquartered in Santa Cruz, California. Investors included CapitalG, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Meritech Capital Partners, Premji Invest, Redpoint Ventures and Goldman Sachs.

“Google Cloud is being used by many of the leading organizations in the world for analytics and decision-making. The combination of Google Cloud and Looker will enable customers to harness data in new ways to drive their digital transformation,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google Cloud. “We remain committed to our multi-cloud strategy and will retain and expand Looker’s capabilities to analyze data across Clouds.”

“The combination of Looker and Google Cloud advances our mission that we undertook from the beginning — to empower humans through the smarter use of data,” said Frank Bien, CEO, Looker. “Now, we’ll have greater reach, more resources, and the brightest minds in both Analytics and Cloud Infrastructure working together to build an exciting path forward for our customers and partners. Together, we are reinventing what it means to solve business problems with data at an entirely different scale and value point.”

https://looker.com/

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LF Edge marks first release of Akraino

LF Edge marked the first release of Akraino Edge Stack Release 1, which is an open source software stack for edge computing systems and applications.

LF Edge is part of the Linux Foundation.

“Akraino R1 represents the first milestone towards creation of a much-needed common framework for edge solutions that address a diverse set of edge use cases,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Automation, Edge and IoT, the Linux Foundation. “With the support of experts from all across the industry, we are paving the way to enable and support future technology at the edge.”

Akraino is currently comprised of 11+ blueprint families with 19+ specific blueprints under development to support a variety of edge use cases. These blueprints include:

• Radio Edge Cloud (REC), part of the Telco Appliance Blueprint Family, REC is a telco- grade edge cloud platform for  containers. It’s main use case is supporting the near real-time RAN Intelligent Controller, a new network element that enables external applications to control aspects of the 5G radio network. REC is the first example of the Telco Appliance Blueprint family which provides a reusable set of modules that will be used to create sibling blueprints for other purpose tuned near real time appliances.
• Integrated Edge Cloud (IEC) Type 1 (Small Edge) & 2 (Medium Edge) is a platform that enables new functionalities and business models on the network edge. It targets telco applications with small and medium deployments of Edge Cloud and supports Arm processors and architecture.
• The Network Cloud family of blueprints enables hardware configuration and fully automated deployment of multiple edge sites from a remote Regional Controller. Specific Network Cloud blueprints in R1 include Unicycle with SR-IOV; Unicycle with OVS-DPDK; and Rover, which supports multiple Telco and Enterprise edge use cases including 5G.
• The StarlingX Far Edge Distributed Cloud blueprint addresses edge and far edge use cases at high-density locations such as malls, airports and sports stadiums to support value added services (such as caching, processing, and analyzing data) at these events and locations.
• Edge Lightweight and IOT (ELIOT) supports use cases for IOT gateway and uCPE (SD-WAN). Addressing Industrial IoT, smart cities, and uCPE, ELIOT enables a lightweight software stack which can be deployed on edge nodes with limited hardware capacity.
• The Kubernetes-Native Infrastructure (KNI) Provider Access Edge blueprint leverages best practices from Kubernetes to manage edge computing stacks at scale and with a consistent, uniform user experience from the infrastructure up to the workloads, on bare metal or public cloud.

https://www.lfedge.org/projects/akraino/release-1/

Linux Foundation targets Unified Open Source Framework for the Edge

Thursday, January 24, 2019  Linux Foundation  

The Linux Foundation is unifying a number of its projects into a new umbrella organization to establish an open, interoperable framework for edge computing independent of hardware, silicon, cloud, or operating system. The goal is the formation of a software stack that brings the best of telecom, cloud, and enterprise (representing location, latency and mobility differentiation).

LF Edge is initially comprised of five projects: Akraino Edge Stack, EdgeX Foundry, and Open Glossary of Edge Computing, formerly stand-alone projects at The Linux Foundation. The initiative also includes a new project contributed by Samsung Electronics, which will create a hub for real-time data collected through smart home devices, and another project from ZEDEDA, which is contributing a new agnostic standard edge architecture.

LF Edge is already supported by the following founding members: (Premier) Arm, AT&T, Baidu, Dell EMC, Dianomic Inc., Ericsson, HP Inc., HPE, Huawei, IBM, Intel, inwinStack, Juniper Networks, MobiledgeX, Netsia, Nokia Solutions, NTT, OSIsoft, Qualcomm Technologies, Radisys, Red Hat, Samsung Electronics, Seagate Technology, Tencent, WindRiver, Wipro, ZEDEDA; and (General) Advantech Co., Alleantia srl,  Beechwoods Software Inc., Canonical Group Limited, CertusNet, CloudPlugs Inc., Concept Reply, DATA AHEAD AG, Enigmedia, EpiSensor, Foghorn Systems Inc., ForgeRock US Inc., Foundries.io, Hangzhou EMQ Technologies Co. Ltd., IOTech Systems Ltd., IoTium, KMC, Linaro, Mainflux, Mocana, NetFoundry, Packet, Pluribus Networks, RackN, Redis Labs, VaporIO, Vitro Technology Corp., Volterra Inc., Wanxiang Group; and (Associate) Automotive Edge Computing Consortium (AECC), Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT), Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), Infrastructure Masons, Inc., and Project Haystack.

More about LF Edge projects:

• Akraino Edge Stack -- creating an open source software stack that supports high-availability cloud services optimized for edge computing systems and applications;
• EdgeX Foundry -- focused on building a common open framework for IoT edge computing.
• Home Edge Project -- seed code contributed by Samsung Electronics, is a new project that concentrates on driving and enabling a robust, reliable, and intelligent home edge computing framework, platform and ecosystem running on a variety of devices in our daily lives.
• Open Glossary of Edge Computing -- provides a concise collection of terms related to the field of edge computing.
• Project EVE (Edge Virtualization Engine) -- contributed by ZEDEDA, will create an open and agnostic standard edge architecture that accommodates complex and diverse on- and off-prem hardware, network and application selections.

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Arista intros campus edge switches

Arista Networks introduced unified wired and wireless campus edge products designed to help enterprises support IoT.

The Arista 720XP Series, which represents Arista’s first purpose-built campus leaf products, includes four fixed configuration models and offers capabilities for new multi-gigabit access port speeds (2.5GBASE-T and 5GBASE-T) enabling the transition to higher speed access devices, up to 60 watts of Power over Ethernet (PoE) for powering IP phones, access points, and IoT devices, and a choice of 25G, 40G and 100G uplink ports for connectivity to Arista Campus Spline platforms.

The 720XP Series runs the same Arista EOS and CloudVision software, bringing a consistent and simplified operational model to the campus edge. Key benefits include:

• Device Analyzer, providing endpoint inventory and deep flow analysis for all connected devices and helping to proactively identify security threat vectors.
• Cloud-like operations, including workflows to simplify change controls though network-wide automation, to reduce the maintenance windows duration, and to quickly assess network compliance.
• Network access control integration through standard RADIUS solutions as well as a standards-based group-based segmentation approach with VXLAN and EVPN.
• Wireless mobility and roaming, leveraging integrated VXLAN tunnel termination instead of legacy controller-based options.
• Expanded device support to manage PoE usage through CloudVision’s dashboards.
• End-to-end Troubleshooting - leverage CloudVision’s network-wide database for unprecedented time-series visibility across campus, data center, and cloud networks in a single view.

Arista said its new campus leaf switches integrate directly with its Cognitive WiFi portfolio, including Arista’s first WiFi 6 access point. The new C-250 access point supports the full 802.11ax standard including 8x8 MU-MIMO, uplink OFDMA & MU-MIMO. Like other Arista enterprise access points, it also includes a 2x2 dual band 3rd radio. With target use cases for WiFi 6 such as higher bandwidth video, and many more simultaneous users, the 3rd radio will be essential. Along with a variety of other data sources, the 3rd radio provides a continuous stream of telemetry data into Arista’s Cognitive WiFi architecture where the power of cloud is harnessed to apply machine learning and cognitive intelligence.

Arista's enterprise focus also includes a broader partnership scope, including an ecosystem of channel partners, managed services partners, and technology partners.

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WhatsApp outage linked to Cogent' London data center

WhatsApp users from multiple locations around the world experienced a major service disruption on Thursday, 06-June-2019 from 10:50am - 11:30am BST & from 1:10pm - 2:13pm BST.

ThousandEyes picked up the outages & identified the issue to 100% packet loss w/in Cogent’s London data center.

https://www.thousandeyes.com/

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Cisco to acquire Sentryo for industrial IoT

Cisco agreed to acquire Sentryo, a company based in Lyon, France that provides device visibility and security solutions for industrial control system (ICS) networks. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Sentryo’s industrial IoT/OT technology helps ensure the resilience of industrial networks and protect against cyber security attacks. The solution is used in the energy, manufacturing, oil and gas and transportation sectors.

Cisco said it will combine Sentryo's capabilities with its own intent-based network architecture.

https://blogs.cisco.com/news/cisco-industrial-iot-news
https://www.sentryo.net/

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NTT Comm signs Zscaler for web security

Zscaler announced a global alliance partnership agreement with NTT Communications to deliver cloud-based internet and web security that scales to all users, regardless of location, enabling enterprises to securely embrace the cloud.

“As a DX Enabler™ of digital transformation, we wish to provide services that help customers transform existing businesses and create new ones. To achieve this aim, we need a cloud platform that is not only flexible and reliable but, also enables utilizing data safely and securely,” said Mr. Fumitaka Takeuchi, a security evangelist at NTT Communications. “By uniting our global communication infrastructure with the world’s highest level of robustness and managed security services with Zscaler’s flexible cloud security services, we provide data management solutions for a new era and support increased resilience in a zero-trust environment.”

“NTT Communications’ reliable communication infrastructure combined with Zscaler’s extensive cloud security platform will enable enterprises to securely transform into cloud-enabled enterprises,” said Al Caravelli, Vice President of Worldwide Global Alliances and Channels at Zscaler.

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Deutsche Telekom launches NB-IoT in Germany

Deutsche Telekom launched its NarrowBand IoT (NB-IoT) service in Germany. The network currently covers 90 percent of the nation's territory and 90% of its population. The rollout will be completed by the end of 2019.

"Our machine and sensor network offers an enormous range of applications," says Kai-Ulrich Deissner, Head of International Technology & Services Delivery, Deutsche Telekom. "Mobility, security or waste management are just a few areas that the new network revolutionizes. It is an important prerequisite for the development of mobile IoT in the years to come."

Deutsche Telekom is also introducing NB-IoT roaming in Europe. As a first step, the national companies in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic support roaming among each other. Other countries will follow.
Nine European subsidiaries and the USA have introduced NB-IoT so far. The Netherlands completed their nationwide rollout in mid-2017. Austria and Slovakia have been covered nationwide since 2018.

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Sprint's mobile hotspot hits 1 Gbps

Sprint is offering mobile hotspot from Inseego Corp. that boasts gigabit-speed performance and enterprise-grade security features.

The MiFi 8000 leverages LTE Advanced-Pro (category 18) technology and 5x carrier aggregation, resulting in higher peak data rates. It allows up to 15 Wi-Fi clients to connect in 2.4GHz or 5GHz bands simultaneously. It also offers IT admin controls, on-board VPN, guest Wi-Fi network, anti-hacking cybersecurity features and advanced enterprise-grade encryption protocols.

“The MiFi 8000 series of gigabit LTE mobile hotspot delivers everything our customers have come to expect from the MiFi brand, with compelling features such as best-in-class security with IT admin controls, the latest advancements in 4G LTE Advanced-Pro technology, and ultra-fast dual-band Wi-Fi,” said Ashish Sharma, CMO and EVP IoT & Mobile Solutions at Inseego. “Inseego solutions provide the missing link for data-hungry enterprise users, SMB, and prosumers who want fast and reliable connections wherever they go, whether it’s a domestic or an international business trip, their home office, or a remote field office.”

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Nokia supplies virtualized Distributed Access Architecture in Norway

Altibox, one of the largest regional telecommunication operators in Norway and Denmark, will deploy Nokia's Gainspeed Unified Cable Access solution, based on a fully virtualized Distributed Access Architecture (vDAA).  The solution enables the operator to deliver enhanced all-IP-based ultra-broadband services to residential and business customers.

Nokia says that by moving the cable access layer functions in the headend and hub sites to the access nodes that sit closer to customers, Altibox and its partners can eliminate some of its legacy cable-specific hardware,  dramatically reducing the amount of power, space and equipment required in the headend. Nokia's vDAA solution will also enable Altibox and Eidsiva Bredbånd  to significantly reduce the number of hub offices, realizing significant real estate cost savings while simplifying network operations.  By virtualizing the headend and network functions, Altibox effectively pushes the digital portion out to the node, ensuring a better signal quality and experience for subscribers.

• In 2016, Nokia acquired Gainspeed, a start-up specializing in DAA (Distributed Access Architecture) solutions for the cable industry via its Virtual CCAP (Converged Cable Access Platform) product line. Financial terms were not disclosed. Gainspeed's Virtual CCAP enables cable operators to increase the capacity of their existing HFC (Hybrid Fiber Coax) infrastructure and rapidly deploy new services, while simultaneously reducing space and power requirements in the headend. The solution also enables cable operators to migrate their networks to a software-driven, all-IP architecture. Gainspeed's design eliminates the physical CCAP by leveraging SDN and NFV to distribute the CCAP’s functions to other devices and locations in the network. This centralizes routing, control and management in the data center or cloud and pushes the physical layer, DOCSIS processing and RF modulation into the node.

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Sharon White to step down as CEO of Ofcom

Sharon White is to step down as Chief Executive of Ofcom, the telecoms regulator for the UK, to become Chairman of The John Lewis Partnership.

White joined Ofcom in March 2015 from HM Treasury where she was Second Permanent Secretary.

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/about-ofcom/how-ofcom-is-run/ofcom-board

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