NTT opens Silicon Valley labs to leverage photonic/quantum tech

NTT Research is opening three labs in Palo Alto, California to focus on quantum computing; cryptography and information security; and medical and health informatics.

In an opening ceremony, NTT President and CEO Jun Sawada said the mission of the new labs is to pursue fundamental breakthroughs in photonic and quantum technologies.

“Our new research center, located in the heart of Silicon Valley, will draw upon the strength and heritage of applied research and innovation from NTT R&D in Japan and will be an ongoing opportunity for sharing groundbreaking research in important technology fields with global partners, clients and academics,” said Mr. Sawada. “Our goal is to strengthen the fundamental research needed for global innovation and next-generation technologies.”

NTT Research consists of NTT Φ (PHI) Laboratories, to focus on Physics and information science (Informatics); NTT Cryptography & Information Security (CIS) Laboratories, to explore advanced cryptography theory and practice; and NTT Medical & Health Informatics (MEI) Laboratories, to investigate areas such as the application of artificial intelligence (AI) on biological data. Kazuhiro Gomi, the former CEO of NTT America, serves as the center’s President and CEO. NTT appoints world-renowned academics and researchers as directors of its three laboratories:

• Professor Yoshihisa Yamamoto to be appointed director of NTT PHI Laboratories, Quantum Science & Computing. Professor Emeritus at NII (Tokyo) and program manager of the Government of Japan’s ImPACT program, Dr. Yamamoto is an expert in quantum optics and information processing. He has also been affiliated with the University of Tokyo, NTT Basic Research Labs, MIT, the Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden), AT&T Bell Labs, Stanford, the Japanese Science and Technology Agency (JST), and RIKEN.
• NTT Fellow Tatsuaki Okamoto to be appointed director of NTT CIS Laboratories, Cryptography & Information Security. Dr. Okamoto is an internationally acclaimed cryptography scientist, recognized for his work in third-generation cryptosystems and the promotion of a trustworthy digital society. He has also held positions at NTT Yokosuka Electrical Communication Labs, the University of Tokyo, the University of Waterloo (Canada), AT&T Bell Labs, Tsukuba University and Kyoto University.
• Professor Hitonobu Tomoike to be appointed director of NTT MEI Laboratories, Medical Health Informatics. Professor Tomoike conducts research into precision medicine, based on bio-sensors and analytics. He is an Advisor to and former Director of the Sakakibara Heart Institute and Fellow of the American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association. He has also held positions at UCSD, Kyushu University, Yamagata University, and the National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center (Osaka).

“NTT R&D, with more than 6,000 researchers and an annual budget of $3.6 billion, is already one of the world’s largest and most respected research groups,” said Mr. Gomi, NTT Research President and CEO. “Our new center in Palo Alto will not only leverage those assets, but also engage with peers in this highly innovative region, enhancing the value that we bring to our trusted global partners.”

NTT Research is also looking at opening additional offices in Boston, Munich, Israel and London.

http://www.ntt-research.com

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Sony picks Orange Business Services for global SD-WAN

Sony Group has selected Orange Business Services to consolidate and transform the communications infrastructure of Sony’s two largest operating companies initially into a harmonized, global. Orange will now be Sony’s principal global provider, delivering a fully automated, intelligent network for all global business units over time.

The new Sony network will be built on the Orange Flexible SD-WAN solution. Initially, it will connect more than 500 locations in over 50 countries across five continents. Financial terms were not disclosed.

“Orange innovation, integration capabilities and international network are the catalysts that will allow us for the first time to bring our regional operating companies under one umbrella,” said Makoto Toyoda, Chief Information Officer, Sony Group. “Only Orange could deliver a platform with the scale and scope to cover all the moving pieces of our international business. It’s a transformative move on our part that opens the way for us to embrace new forms of IT innovation that will push the company forward.”

“Sony is forging a strong, new path with its global SD-WAN infrastructure,” said Rob Willcock, President of the Americas, Orange Business Services. “We are pleased Sony chose Orange as its key partner in their transformation, and we are ready to step in and bring immediate clarity to their worldwide communications network. Orange has the technology, reach and people to make that possible for customers inside and outside the U.S.”

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GTT to acquire KPN International for EUR 50 million

GTT Communications agreed to acquire KPN International for approximately €50 million in cash, on a cash and debt-free basis.

KPN International, which is headquartered in the Netherlands and is a division of KPN N.V., operates a global IP network serving enterprise and carrier clients.

GTT said the acquisition augments its the scale and reach of its Tier 1 global IP network in Europe. KPN International's network spans 21 countries, including long-haul fiber routes and metro rings in Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris. It has more than 400 strategic enterprise and carrier clients.

“The acquisition of KPN International deepens our market presence in the European region,” said Rick Calder, GTT president and CEO. “The world-class resources contributed from this acquisition, including a highly experienced team, international network assets and a deep roster of multinational clients, will help us deliver on our purpose of connecting people across organizations around the world and to every application in the cloud.”

The acquisition is expected to close in the third quarter 2019 subject to obtaining the required regulatory approvals.

GTT acquires Accelerated Connections, expanding across Canada

Monday, March 12, 2018  GTT, Merger & Acquisitions  

GTT Communications has acquired Accelerated Connections (ACI), a Toronto-headquartered provider of managed networking, voice-over-IP (VoIP) and colocation services, serving large distributed Canadian enterprises. Financial terms were not disclosed at this time.

ACI operates a network connecting all of Canada's provinces, as well as two state-of-the-art data center facilities.

GTT said the acquisition extends its market presence and unique network assets in Canada, including its landing station for GTT Express, the lowest latency transatlantic cable system. The acquisition also adds strategic clients in key vertical markets, including hospitality, retail and financial services.

“ACI’s deep experience in delivering cloud networking services to distributed enterprises in Canada significantly expands GTT’s global presence,” said Rick Calder, GTT president and CEO. “This acquisition demonstrates our commitment to invest in assets and capabilities that enable us to deliver on our purpose of connecting people across organizations and around the world.”

“The combination of ACI and GTT creates a disruptive competitor in the Canadian market,” said Michael Garbe, ACI CEO. “Customers will benefit from access to GTT’s Tier 1 IP network, comprehensive service portfolio, global reach and deep experience in connectivity and managed services. We expect a rapid and smooth integration over the coming months.”

GTT's acquisition of Interoute adds 72K km of European fiber to its transatlantic cables

Monday, February 26, 2018  GTT, Interoute, Merger & Acquisitions  No Comments

GTT Communications agreed to acquire Interoute, operator of one of Europe’s largest independent fiber networks and cloud networking platforms, for approximately €1.9 billion ($2.3 billion) in cash.

Interoute's European fiber backbone spans 72,000 route kilometers connects nearly 200 data centres and colocation facilities.  Interoute also owns 15 of its own data centers and 33 colocation facilities. Its customers include international enterprises, as well as the world’s major service providers, ICPs and OTT providers. The company also operates 18 Interoute Virtual Data Centres (VDCs) globally, including three in Asia-Pacific, which are tied into its fiber backbone. In October 2017, Interoute launched its "Edge SD-WAN" service.

Interoute offers transport services (wavelength, Carrier Ethernet, managed bandwidth, storage connect, IP transit, cloud connect) and infrastructure services (dark fiber and data center colocation).

Interoute reported revenues of €718 million and adjusted EBITDA of €165 million for the 12 months ending September 30, 2017.

GTT said the merger contributes significant infrastructure, edge and hosted services to its network, as well as over 1,000 strategic enterprise and carrier clients, primarily headquartered in Europe.

In January 2017, GTT acquired Hibernia Networks and its five subsea cables, including Hibernia Express, the lowest latency transatlantic cable system, and eight cable landing stations, new global points of presence, and key clients in the financial services, media and entertainment, web-centric and service provider segments.

“The acquisition of Interoute represents a major milestone in delivering on our purpose of connecting people, across organizations and around the world,” said Rick Calder, GTT president and CEO. 

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ABB launches data center automation cloud solution

ABB is piloting a new data center automation offering with one of the fastest growing colocation data center providers globally.

The new ABB Ability solution was developed to optimize data center performance, increase tenant retention, provide agile communications between operations and upper management, and reduce costs.

“This is an exciting new ABB AbilityTM Data Center Automation solution and it is a world first. A leading colocation data center provider in Singapore was the obvious choice with whom to work not just on the project pilot but also as a partner in development,” said Madhav Kalia, global business manager, Data Center Automation at ABB. “Their world vision and leading market position meant that they were able to offer a very valuable, constructive contribution, including helping us to define the minimum viable product (MVP) requirements."

http://www.abb.com

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Mellanox invests in CNEX Labs and Pliops

Mellanox Capital, which is the investment arm of Mellanox Technologies, has made equity investments in storage start-ups CNEX Labs and Pliops, both of which are pushing software defined and intelligent storage to the next level of performance, efficiency, and scalability.

CNEX Labs, which targest high-performance storage semiconductors, has developed Denali/Open-Channel NVMe Flash storage controllers/

Pliops is transforming data center infrastructure with a new class of storage processors that deliver massive scalability and lower the cost of data services.

“Mellanox is committed to enabling customers to harness the power of distributed compute and disaggregated storage to improve the performance and efficiency of analytics and AI applications,” said Nimrod Gindi, senior vice president of mergers and acquisitions and head of investments, Mellanox Technologies. “Optimizing datacenter solutions requires faster, smarter storage connected with faster, smarter networks, and our investments in innovative storage leaders such as CNEX Labs and Pliops will accelerate the deployment of scale-out storage and data-intensive analytics solutions. Our strategic partnerships with these innovative storage mavericks are transforming the ways that customers can bring compute closer to storage to access and monetize the business value of data.”

With Mellanox, NVIDIA targets full compute/network/storage stack

Monday, March 11, 2019  Mellanox, Nvidia  

NVIDIA agreed to acquire Mellanox in a deal valued at approximately $6.9 billion.

The merger targets data centers in general and the high-performance computing (HPC) market in particular. Together, NVIDIA’s computing platform and Mellanox’s interconnects power over 250 of the world’s TOP500 supercomputers and have as customers every major cloud service provider and computer maker. Mellanox pioneered the InfiniBand interconnect technology, which along with its high-speed Ethernet products is now used in over half of the world’s fastest supercomputers and in many leading hyperscale datacenters.

NVIDIA said the acquired assets enables it to data center-scale workloads across the entire computing, networking and storage stack to achieve higher performance, greater utilization and lower operating cost for customers.

“The emergence of AI and data science, as well as billions of simultaneous computer users, is fueling skyrocketing demand on the world’s datacenters,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Addressing this demand will require holistic architectures that connect vast numbers of fast computing nodes over intelligent networking fabrics to form a giant datacenter-scale compute engine.

“We share the same vision for accelerated computing as NVIDIA,” said Eyal Waldman, founder and CEO of Mellanox. “Combining our two companies comes as a natural extension of our longstanding partnership and is a great fit given our common performance-driven cultures. This combination will foster the creation of powerful technology and fantastic opportunities for our people.”

NVIDIA also promised to continue investing in Israel, where Mellanox is based.

The companies expect to close the deal by the end of 2019.

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Orange completes acquisition of SecureLink for EUR 515 million

Orange completed its previously-announced acquisition of SecureLink, a leading independent cybersecurity player in Europe, for EUR 515 million.

SecureLink provides a full range of cybersecurity services including specialized security consulting, security maintenance and support with 24/7 service desks (SOCs) as well as advanced managed detection and response capabilities (MDR). The group is also a leading value-added reseller of security software and hardware solutions, holding more than 1,000 technical or sales accreditations with blue chip security vendors.

SecureLink was founded in 2003 and is based in the Netherlands with over 660 employees and 14 offices. In 2018, SecureLink recorded IFRS revenues of €248m.

Orange said the acquisition makes it one of the European leaders of cybersecurity with c.1,800 employees, more than €600m PF revenues in 2018 and strong positions in major local markets through its unique European DNA and a comprehensive cybersecurity services offering.

Orange is already a leading player in the French market through Orange Cyberdefense (€303m revenues in 2018, up 12% vs. 2017).

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DriveNets discloses high-profile investors

DriveNets announced that a further $7 million has been added to its Series A financing round and the addition of three new investors: Microsoft chairman John Thompson, Seagate chairman Steve Luczo, and former Palo Alto Networks CEO Mark McLaughlin.

DriveNet scales its disaggregated router to 400G

Wednesday, April 17, 2019  DriveNets, Start-Ups  

DriveNets, a start-up based in Israel, announced 400G-port routing support to its Network Cloud software-based disaggregated router.

The company says its Network Cloud is the only router on the market designed to scale 100/400G ports up to a performance of 768 Tbps. Inspired by the hyperscalers, Network Cloud runs the routing data plane on cost-efficient white-boxes and the control plane on standard servers, disconnecting network cost from capacity growth.

DriveNets’ latest routing software release supports a packet-forwarding white-box based on Broadcom’s Jericho2 chipset which has high-speed, high-density port interfaces of 100G and 400G.

The platform is now being tested and certified by a tier-1 Telco customer.

DriveNets was founded in 2015 by Ido Susan and Hillel Kobrinsky. Susan previously co-founded Intucell, which was acquired by Cisco for $475 million. Kobrinsky founded the web conferencing specialist, Interwise, which was acquired by AT&T for $121 million.

In February, the company emerged from stealth with $110 Million in Series A funding.

“Unlike existing offerings, Network Cloud has built a disaggregated router from scratch. We adapted the data-center switching model behind the world’s largest clouds to routing, at a carrier-grade level, to build the world’s largest Service Providers’ networks. We are proud to show how DriveNets can rapidly and reliably deploy technological innovations at that scale,” said Ido Susan CEO and Co-Founder of DriveNets.

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Emerson acquires Zedi's cloud SCADA business

Emerson has acquired Zedi’s software and automation businesses. Zedi offers a cloud supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) platform that is currently enabling customers to monitor more than 2 million sensors and thousands of devices and applications. Key customers include oil and gas producers. Zedi’s software and automation businesses are based in Calgary, Canada, with approximately 155 employees in North America.

Emerson said that its will combine Zedi’s scalable cloud platform and applications expertise with its own applications, controller, instrumentation and flow metering portfolio, thereby expanding its opportunities across the global oil and gas production market.

“As world energy demand continues to grow, helping our vital oil and gas market customers maximize their resources is a top priority,” said Lal Karsanbhai, executive president of Emerson’s Automation Solutions business. “Through our vast portfolio of automation technologies, we are helping the industry navigate ever-changing market dynamics and operational challenges. The addition of Zedi strengthens our ability to help customers leverage the latest advances from the field to the refinery.”

“Oil and gas producers today are challenged to meet production targets while controlling costs, and they are looking for opportunities to transform operations and make their teams more effective through digital solutions like analytics and mobility,” said Jim Nyquist, group president of Emerson’s systems and solutions business. “This important investment bolsters our portfolio and ability to help Emerson’s customers achieve Top Quartile performance through emerging Industrial Internet of Things technologies.”

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