Routers

Ericsson develops packet-optical gear for metro surge

Ericsson is fielding a line of packet optical gear designed to address the expected surge in metro networking. The new products will support a T-MPLS control plane, but Ericsson plans to upgrade to the more modern MPLS-TP and is also considering PBT (PBB-TE).

Metro capacity may be driven by a host of factors in 2009 and 2010 and the operators may be more interested than usual in the optical layer. This has implications on the Carrier Ethernet and IP MPLS wars since optical spending tends to encourage operators to deploy some control plane architecture, and that could then pull through either switches or routers.

New Cisco edge router to focus on metro apps in 2009

Cisco has announced a new edge router, the 9000, which is widely expected to be the replacement for its aging but important 7600 series. The new box features a card design that gives it a very high per-card capacity, making it capable of supporting the new 100 Mbps Ethernet standard when it is finalized. The box is most likely to be deployed in an edge-of-core or metro-core application, with the latter application focusing on replacing PBT with MPLS inside a metro network. We believe that Cisco will be going full out in 2009 on the metro applications, as well as on “glamour” plays like its deal with the Yankees for an immersive multimedia experience in the stadium.

Juniper continues software transformation

Juniper has announced the first major innovation in its Service Layer Technology area, something it calls the Dynamic Services Architecture. This is a new product set, the first of which is the SRX Services Gateway, built on a platform that tightly couples service feature hosting and both signaling and control plane protocol handling. Cards are software-configurable to support multiple services, firewall services being the first announced.

This is the second of Juniper’s announcements that have created a “higher-than-the-network” layer of technology, the first being the company’s support of hosted control plane software for JUNOS. When you add this to the recent management changes at Juniper, it begins to look as though the company may be taking a turn more toward software and “transformation” versus routers and “convergence”.

Siemens telecom purchase: Signal of strength?

The decision by billionaire Alec Gores to buy the Siemens telecom business may be a signal that the longer-term fundamentals of telecom are stronger than many expect, or it may be an indication that Gores has taken one gamble to many. We have reservations about the space for the next two to three years, the period in which the sorting out of the new revenue paradigm will be essential for carriers to continue their equipment spending on players like Siemens.

There are favorable signs and challenges. Verizon’s report showed that data revenues were up, but the company conceded that most were linked to Blackberry-type phones and laptop access, not to mobile phone data applications, which means they were business related and not consumer. We believe that Siemens was later than most in recognizing the shift to the consumer, and that makes it a harder property to rehab.

Emerging economies create emerging vendors

Emerging economies’ telecom deals may be creating a new wave of key players, absent some of the usual names. The recent action in China and India show that where an emerging economy invests in telecom infrastructure, the deals are weighted toward access, metro and fiber, and less to the high-flying switching/routing. Package bids that involve a range of products are also more common. This favors players like Alcatel-Lucent, whose broad portfolio of access products and metro solutions got it attention in India, but also price-leader players like Huawei and ZTE. We believe it is likely that there will be pressure put on Cisco, Juniper, Tellabs, Ciena and other more narrowly focused players to partner or even merge to counter the trend.

ALU must differentiate itself from Huawei

Huawei may have a reputation for being just a price leader, but that’s enough to propel significant growth outside China and pull it into the DSL port shipment lead over Alcatel-Lucent. We believe that Huawei is not so much a competitor as a fall-back when there is no real “competition”, meaning where vendors fail to generate any meaningful differentiation. Price then decides, and Huawei wins.

The success recently may be due in small part to economic conditions, but we believe the largest part is due to equipment vendors ceding key strategic issues in service creation and management to partners. That being done, the equipment is just plumbing and the partner solutions can be applied over Huawei. We believe ALU sees this, and that it was a motivation behind its purchase of subscriber management specialist firm Motive.

Router sales up…an IP economic indicator

Infonetics reports that router sales in the first quarter rose sharply, further validating the notion that the IP infrastructure market is more immune to economic problems than the enterprise. Both Juniper and Cisco gained market share, apparently in part at the expense of Alcatel-Lucent, whose IPTV position had previously been gaining it traction. We have long believed that IPTV would not be the silver bullet for ALU; too few regions meet the very special economic demographic requirements to make the strategy optimal.

Juniper move signals original processor work?

David Yen, a kingpin in Sun’s revitalized microprocessor program, is leaving Sun for Juniper, where he will be an executive VP of Emerging Technologies, a move that certainly means that Juniper will be doing more original work with microprocessors and/or network processors. There has been a lot of new energy at Juniper in recent months, suggesting that the company is about to make some aggressive moves in the market to sustain its growth and take advantage of loss of market momentum by its mobile-exposed competitors.

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.

Juniper separates router control plane processing

Juniper today announced a significant shift in the traditional architecture of routers, one that allows an external server (the JCS 1200) to provide control plane processing for forwarding-plane networks created on Juniper’s line of routers. Traditional router architecture has used either an integrated processor for both data forwarding and control processing, or a separate board within the router for the control plane handling. The new architecture allows an enormous increase in the processing resources available to handle “control plane” activity, which includes the processing of management requests, topology updates, and other IP control packets. Since Juniper has previously announced an “Open Junos” architecture where developers can add logic to the Junos control plane software, this would appear to open the door to embed significant service and feature intelligence in network devices. This in turn could empower service providers to differentiate their services through these embedded features, or to sell access to them as a new revenue source.