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NewsGlobe: Interviews
Alcatel/Lucent is living on the edge
Beefs up its SR and ESS product lines
by Sean Buckley
Click here to listen to the Audiocast
The story of Alcatel/Lucent’s business, while rich with the heritage of the former legacy Alcatel and Lucent has been a story of continued innovation. To bolster its own networking capabilities, the former Alcatel in 2003 bought the former TiMetra Networks for US$150 million. This all transpired the day that Telecommunications Americas profiled the former TiMetra in its ‘Coolest Companies’ award series at Supercomm (now NXTcomm) 2003. In the following Audiocast, Sean Buckley, Editor in Chief of Telecommunications talks with president of Alcatel/Lucent’s IP business and former TiMetra President and CEO Basil Alwan about the evolution of “the services edge.”
In the Audiocast, Alwan answers the following questions:
Let’s start with a quick history lesson. As the former president and CEO
of TiMetra—a company the former Alcatel bought the day
Telecommunications went to press with its “Coolest New Companies”
series in June 2003—how have service providers evolved their respective
metro and edge networks?
Do you think that by being part of a larger company such as Alcatel, and
now Alcatel-Lucent, you have been able to further your “service router”
vision?
More recently, Alcatel-Lucent upgraded the flagship 7750 Service Router
(SR) and the 7450 Ethernet service switch (ESS) with Terabit
capabilities. Certainly it would be hard to pick out one specific trend, but
what are the service and network trends that are driving the need for
products with these capabilities?
A recent ALU presentation on the upgrades to your flagship mentioned
the idea of extending the third wave of routing. Can you talk about
these waves and your approach?
Finally, no discussion on next-gen service routing would be complete
without talking about Ethernet. As one of the co-authors of the Virtual
Private Line Service (VPLS) standard, how do you see Ethernet overall
service evolving into one of the dominant carrier grade services for
enterprises and other new applications such as wireless backhaul?
Click here to listen to the Audiocast
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