NEW MARCONI ROUTER FOCUSES ON IP SERVICE VIRTUALIZATION

Marconi's new data networks group last week announced an IP edge router that offers service providers a new way to add profits to their data service picture. The Marconi Services Router centralizes intelligence at the IP edge, to make customer premises equipment less complex and costly. It also supports thousands of IP virtual private networks of multiple types on a single system.

“This is something you don't see from any other vendor; they are really creating a niche for themselves,” said Kevin Mitchell, directing analyst of service provider voice and data for Infonetics Research. “The edge router market is the fastest-growing segment in the service provider router and switch space — and also the largest market — so there is a lot of opportunity out there. What's smart is that Marconi is not trying to be a ‘me-too’ to the other products that have come out.”

Instead, the company is focused on what it calls service virtualization using a programmable dynamic services blade as an open processor for the addition of services designed by Marconi, third parties or the service providers themselves.

“This is the lynchpin of our data networking strategy,” said Agnes Imregh, vice president of product marketing for Marconi. “Service providers can take back control of their means of differentiating data. They can begin to offer premium IP services over a mixed IP/ATM network, which they can either develop themselves or choose their own partners for deploying services and applications and do so in a secure and cost-effective environment.”

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. While other edge routers lean toward multiservice capabilities and being able to support legacy and new IP services, Marconi is squarely focused on IP/virtual private networks (VPNs).

“This borders on being revolutionary,” said industry analyst Tom Nolle, president of CIMI. “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 that has figured out the fact that if the mission of IP has changed, maybe the equipment needs to change, too.”

The Marconi Services Router features an 80 Gb/s switch fabric and can support virtual routing VPNs and the standard RPC 2547, as well as internetworking between the two. The separation of customer traffic onto separate virtual routers provides an extra layer of security and defense against the broad impact of denial of service attacks. Each customer channel can be configured, provisioned, monitored and debugged individually using Marconi's ServiceOn network management system.

Dalton Utilities in Georgia is already using the system as it transitions its fiber-to-the-premises network from ATM to IP.

The real challenge for Marconi will be “selling the concept of Marconi as a vendor of IP routing,” Mitchell said.

Nolle agreed. “The question is whether Marconi can articulate the value proposition for something this radically different and carry it into carrier accounts,” he said. “Sometimes it's hard to be the first one out.”

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