Lucent expands IP-services product family

Lucent Technologies has added five pieces to its IP-services product portfolio to help service providers customize offerings to cover the gamut of user needs, from individual “road warriors” to high-end data centers.

“Lucent believes it is important to have a unified network management and provisioning scheme and solution that spans this whole product family,” said Fred Kemmerer, vice president/general manager of the Networking Systems Edge Access Systems-WAN Systems group. “As our customers look at building large networks, the ability to have a centralized tool to set up all these products into unified applications becomes very important.”

IP transport is not meeting its potential because there are gaps in the product offerings, Kemmerer said.

“Pure IP transport networks are not providing the kind of return on investment performance that our customers need to grow their businesses,” he said, noting Lucent’s solution enables high-value services across the entire network scheme and lets service providers deliver these new services economically.

“We’re taking an approach to this market that says there is not one set of solutions or one set of products that are going to solve all the problems,” Kemmerer said.

Lucent’s product portfolio is based on a multiservice platform, thus “the platforms that we're providing for our customers to build will extend and scale well as they offer additional services to the same customers,” said Kemmerer. Among those services are managed security, managed bandwidth, integrated voice and data, and business-quality multi-tenant access.

Lucent’s five new products include three lower-end-price segment IP services routing products and two additions to its firewall and security portfolio.

“We believe that it’s very important to have multi-service platforms that can be purchased and installed to deliver one IP service and then be expanded through configuration and central management to deliver others without incremental investment,” Kemmerer said. “There is no one right way to do IP services and security, and we try to support a full range of options for everything from road warriors with PCs all the way up to fairly sophisticated and highly scalable network-based solutions.”