Carrier Ethernet

Carrier Ethernet work continues for inter-provider connections

Vendors and the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) are working to correct an Ethernet omission that may or may not have much relevance to customer interest or service success—the inter-provider NNI. Ethernet standards have not addressed this issue fully because there has been relatively little interest in using Ethernet for long-haul connections, but some believe that the BT interest in PBT for leased-line and frame relay replacement indicate that Ethernet could have a future at a national/international level. This may also spark more interest in pan-provider service management work being done by the IPsphere Forum.

ECI enters Carrier Ethernet fray

ECI is entering the Carrier Ethernet market, leveraging in part the MPLS tools that the company obtained from Laurel Networks when it acquired that company. This space is a critical one because it is the focus of some fundamental debates—is Ethernet a service framework or a metro architecture, and can it displace some or all of MPLS. We believe that Carrier Ethernet can be a service and metro architecture and can displace an important chunk of the MPLS opportunity, but only if providers understand how to build metro infrastructure from Ethernet and not just offer Ethernet services. ECI seems to be moving in the correct direction, but the details of its products are still too sparse to be sure.

Juniper “gets” the network/computer vision

Juniper held its analyst day on Thursday (March 6, 2008), and the company was more polished and articulate than on previous occasions. The message that the “online revolution” has created a demand for a new vision of network/computer coupling is strong and was supported strongly by a T-Systems speaker, but not seized as effectively by Juniper as we’d have liked. Juniper also failed to leverage clear references by T-Systems to IPsphere and TMF standards work, and in the former Juniper has credibility. However, the message was there, and it’s clear that Juniper gets it, but the company needs to articulate it more clearly. In the area of the new Ethernet EX products, Juniper articulated a strong channel program that has credibility as the go-to-market strategy for the EX, lifting our fear that it believed its software partners, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle, were going to sell it. All in all, it was a positive step for Juniper.

Nortel’s Carrier Ethernet perception confused

Nortel, whose performance in the last quarter was significantly below expectations, is pinning a lot of its hopes on grabbing a major share of the Carrier Ethernet market. A major barrier to Nortel’s goals is a lack of company perception on just what that market is, arising out of the same kind of product-group parochialism that we have cited for Alcatel-Lucent. Metro infrastructure is a single strategy, not a combination of three or four technology- and customer-specific approaches, and without that understanding you cannot hope to succeed. With its advanced PBT position, Nortel is well positioned to address this “real” metro market, but as a company its strategies have fallen behind its technologies.

Service providers increase PBT testing

Telefonica has joined the ranks of operators who acknowledge they are testing PBT. As we have indicated, 10 out of 10 of our service provider survey base is conducting or planning PBT tests, but the majority have still not made their commitment public. We believe that there will be five more public announcements of PBT activity among major national providers in 2008.

Dueling Cisco/Juniper Ethernet switch rumors

Rumors continue to spin around a new Juniper enterprise Ethernet switch and a competing Cisco product launched, not surprisingly, at about the same time. As we reported last week, financial analysts were predicting that Juniper would launch its Ethernet switch on January 29th in New York at a meeting scheduled for the financial and media communities, and Cisco has traditionally worked to trump competitive announcements by making one of their own just before that date. All of this is aimed at the larger “data center” or enterprise headquarters market, a market that in 2008 may be more challenging than it was in 2007 according to our research.

Carrier Ethernet creates equipment market shifts

Research is confirming what many have noticed anecdotally: Cisco, Juniper and Nortel are gaining in the carrier router-switch market and Alcatel-Lucent is declining. The shift is likely driven in large part by the shifts toward Carrier Ethernet deployment from traditional routing, a shift that Nortel stands to gain the most from because of PBT. Nortel showed the largest gains, too. Juniper just announced an Ethernet product, and it showed gains as well. Cisco has an Ethernet line and had a strong showing. While Alcatel-Lucent has Ethernet products, it has been submerging them in its IPTV positioning. We believe this shift will not stop at the end of the year, and that it will put the greatest pressure on Alcatel-Lucent. But it will also pressure Juniper since that company has no PBT capability in its Ethernet product. PBT’s features and perceived future value are the real drivers of the change, make no mistake.

Hammerhead Systems’ service-based PBT strategy

Hammerhead Systems has announced a service-based PBT (Provider Backbone Transport) strategy that adds the MEF E-LAN and E-Tree connection models to the traditional PBT E-Line model. The move is the first in the industry to aim PBT directly at creating retail services rather than at managing traffic and failure modes. Hammerhead also announced a partnership with Soapstone Networks, a unit of Avici, to provide flexible control plane support for the Hammerhead products. We believe this is an important step in evolving PBT to serve a key mission in both metro infrastructure and service infrastructure, and for the first time it gives some credence to the PBT-versus-MPLS battle that has raged in the media.

Juniper earns Carrier Ethernet credibility

September 25 2007: Juniper has released two new members of its Ethernet family, giving Juniper the full range of product capacities it needs to be a credible player in the carrier Ethernet market. In the announcement, Juniper made no specific mention of the two emerging carrier-Ethernet standards PBB and PBT, but the products’ features seem to make it clear that Juniper has designed them with both capabilities in mind. Juniper’s comment is that they “will support what the customer requires”. It is fair to say that Juniper has been historically reluctant to embrace a standard until it has been fully ratified (which neither PBB nor PBT are at this point), but it’s also fair to say that our own research shows almost universal provider interest in, if not support of, both these technologies. The question now is whether Juniper can sustain carrier Ethernet dialogs without specific support of PBT, in particular. A related question is whether Cisco will now move more aggressively on PBT to overhang the Juniper announcement. As we noted below, there is already a Cisco/UBS brief scheduled for today, and this might be a forum Cisco would use to take a position on PBT.

Relevant Reading
Juniper Networks press release