Marconi leaps back into data fray

Marconi today announced a bold move aimed at regaining some of the company's lost glory. The company announced a carrier-grade IP routing platform that it says is intended to allow service providers to centralize the intelligence of data services, creating virtual networks that operate with less-costly CPE and less overall network complexity.

The Marconi Services Router is based on technology the company acquired when it bought Crescent Networks, and is the first product in what Marconi says will be a new portfolio.

The product announcement comes after Marconi has suffered a series of setbacks, the most recent being its failure to land a piece of BT's 21st Century Network business, but it represents a significant step forward for the company, said analyst Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corp.

"This borders on being revolutionary," Nolle said. "What Marconi is basically doing here is playing on a trend that is very real and not very recognized. Without very much fanfare, IP purchasing is now dominated by non-Internet players. Common carriers are buying IP, and their mission is converged infrastructure that is not really part of the Internet. Marconi is one of a group of vendors who have figured out the fact that if the mission of IP has changed, maybe the equipment needs to change too."

The goal of the Marconi Services Router is to make IP-Virtual Private Network services into "high-value, low-touch" offerings that generate higher profits, said Agnes Imregh, vice president of product marketing for Marconi.

"The network is so complex between the enterprise and their edge products, it is difficult for them to roll out new products," she commented. "There are all different revisions of software, which are difficult to manage. The enterprise product has to be upgraded as well as the carrier product. Often the carriers that we talk to have difficulty in recruiting the technical expertise to manage these kinds of complex networks effectively. They get to a point of reverse economies of scale--the next customer you add costs you more than previous customers because of added complexity."

By centralizing resources, service providers don't have to upgrade both CPE and distributed network gear to upgrade or add on to a service, she said. The Marconi Services Router can support thousands of customers, with each customer having its own separate quality of service, available in eight levels. In addition, the Marconi Service Router supports multiple types of VPNs--including Virtual Routing and RFC 2547 VPNs, as well as VPN interworking and hosted voice over IP service.

The system is based on a dynamic services blade that was created as an open platform for service programming by third parties or service providers themselves. The Marconi Services Router features an 80 gigabit per second switch fabric.

The challenge for Marconi will be to regain its credibility among service providers to launch this product, said Nolle.

"It takes a lot to sell to the service provider market," he said. "It takes a good product, a good message and powerful sales force with the right connections. And there is a level of support required. They've got a good product but Marconi still has to demonstrate those others."