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NewsGlobe: Currents
XO, Cisco expand relationship
Companies will collaborate on customer acquisition, product migration
by Jim Barthold
XO Communications, already a big Cisco Systems customer,
is enhancing its relationship to cover business development,
market development, product development and service
creation as it chases into new markets within the enterprise
space.
“Cisco has been a partner of ours for a very long time (and)
this provided us an opportunity to strike a more strategic
relationship,” said Vince Margiotta, vice president of product
management for XO’s business services group.
The primary target for the new collaboration is the enterprise
where XO will leverage what it’s done in the upper mid-market
and move it more broadly into the overall commercial space.
“XO doesn’t do a lot of advertising and doesn’t have a strong
brand at the enterprise level,” Margiotta said. “This is a great
opportunity for us to partner with somebody who does have a
very strong brand, who does have a lot of enterprise
relationships and has a vested interest in us to help
penetrate that market as fast as possible. They’re a natural
partner for us.”
Cisco, of course, benefits in terms of equipment sales to XO.
The nationwide IP network provider has accelerated
deployment of Ethernet-enabled IP services by deploying
Cisco Ethernet over SONET/SDH technology on about 4,000
multi-service provisioning platforms it already has installed.
This upgrade, based on Cisco’s IP NGN architecture, includes
Cisco 10 gigabit Ethernet over SONET/SDH technology.
“I would never say a new product is a drop-in. this can go in
their existing deployed infrastructure; it’s an upgrade,” said
David Friedman, senior product manager at Cisco. “Because
these cards support 10 gigs instead of 2.5 gigs, it allows
them to roll out more services faster.”
Those services, including a new MPLS VPN, SIP, and a new IP-
based trunking service will all eat bandwidth.
“One of the things that Cisco brings to us is their vision, their
expertise and they can help us focus our R&D investment
dollars in product innovation and service creation on the
things that they think would give us the best bang for our
bucks,” Margiotta said. “They’re helping us with engineering
as well as some reasonable funding. They’re going to help us
penetrate that enterprise space faster.”
For now 10 gigabits is enough to meet that demand, although
40 gigabit technology is available and 100 gigabits is on the
horizon. XO, like many in the industry, is not jumping at 40
when 10 will do the job and 100 will be there soon.
“We’ve just seen explosive demand from our customers in
terms of the bandwidth they needed so we made the
investment with Cisco … to upgrade the network so we can
support a multitude of 10-gig IP ports for customers across
the country,” said Eric Points, senior product manager of XO’s
carrier services group. “We can supply the marketplace where
it is today in terms of the demand that we’re seeing from our
carrier customers.”
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