N + I: Reporter's notebook

LAS VEGAS—Cisco

President and CEO John Chambers was decidedly upbeat during his keynote address yesterday, obviously buoyed by his company’s positive quarterly earnings results announced on Monday. He said that while he wasn't predicting an economic turnaround just yet, he is seeing for the first time in quite awhile "some positive signals" after closely monitoring manufacturing activity in the U.S., UK, and Germany. Chambers added that the U.S. currently is in a "show me" economy and companies won't begin to increase their capex spending until their CEOs start to see their own revenues increase. He also told N + I attendees they needed to embrace the concept of the “networked virtual organization,” or “office anywhere” if they wanted to see productivity growth rates rise above the current 1%. (He thinks 3% is a no-brainer and 5% to 10% is doable.) Chambers added that the key to the networked virtual organization is the convergence of voice, data and video on the same network. "The Internet is about empowerment, but it only works if you know where you're going and you have access to the data you need to get there," he said.…

Nortel Networks made several announcements during the show including the introduction of its Secure Routing Technology architecture that merges dynamic routing and virtual private networking into one device capable of delivering secure IP services. Nortel said the device could drive down network ownership costs for enterprises by as much as 70%, based on its benchmarks. Nortel also announced it is supporting Sprint's IP VPN offering introduced this week with the deployment of its Passport multiservice switching portfolio.…

Foundry Networks unveiled the newest addition to its gigabit over copper switching portfolio, the EdgeIron 10GC2F midrange gigabit Ethernet aggregation switch. The switch can handle up to 17.9 million packets per second and will support up to 8000 NAC addresses and 512 active VLANs.…

The 10 Gigabit Ethernet Alliance said that all technical work on its pending standard is complete and has been presented to an IEEE standardization board for review. The group--which consists of more than 80 member companies--expects the review process to be completed by September, but is hopeful that it could be completed as early as June. Twenty-four companies staged an interoperability demo during N + I and will be repeating the demo at Supercomm in Atlanta next month.…

Broadwing introduced a suite of managed network services for enterprises consisting of fully managed turnkey solutions for its frame relay, ATM, IP and private line products. The services include proactive network monitoring, a managed firewall and intrusion detection.…

Holoplex used N + I as the launching point for its enhanced free space optics offering. The product was launched to the European market at CEBIT in March. Anthony Bladon, Holoplex’s marketing vice president said the company has solved the problem of inclement weather by developing a more concentrated beam that elevates the available link margin to 40 decibels, which he said was about double that of other free space optics products currently on the market. “It cuts through fog, haze, sleet and snow with no problem,” Bladon said. He added that the more concentrated beam is more impervious to security threats as well….

Network security was a major theme of this year's N + I. Seemingly, one couldn't walk more than 20 feet without tripping over an exhibitor hawking some security solution. While keeping up with security technology is important for enterprises, Alan Simpkins, senior director of security for security solutions provider Equant, cautioned that too many companies pay too little attention to security policies. "Security is more about policy than technology implementation. In fact, the technology part is actually pretty simple," he said. "Businesses don't keep with their policies, and the policies don't keep up with the business." Simpkins said a security policy is no different than an insurance policy. "You never think you're going to have an accident, but are you prepared if you do?"