NBN looming: network vendors ramp up service provider marketing

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 25 January 2011 12:07

IT Industry - Strategy

Network equipment vendors Juniper Networks and Brocade have both made new appointments to their service provider marketing teams, with Juniper saying there is renewed momentum in the Australian market as service providers prepare to exploit the National Broadband Network.

Brocade has appointed 20-year industry veteran and former Cisco executive, Ravi Saxena, to head up its service provider business in Asia Pacific, based in Singapore. He was most recently vice president of service provider business development with Cisco Systems India and before that, vice president of SP at Cisco Systems India.

Announcing his appointment, Brocade said: "Industry research firm IDC predicts that service provider revenues in APAC for network infrastructure will be about $3 billion in 2011 growing to more than $4 billion by 2014. APAC is one of the most vibrant markets in the world for service providers due to strong demand among its billions of residents and businesses for mobile phone, wireless, broadband, IPTV and triple play services."

Brocade was focused on data centre networking but in late 2008 it entered the enterprise and service provider networking market with the acquisition of Foundry Networks and now claims to offer "a broad portfolio of high-performance, scalable, carrier-class networking solutions that meet the stringent requirements of the always-on service provider business environment."

Deb Dutta, vice president of Brocade Asia Pacific, said: "Brocade is already enjoying strong storage area network footprint within tier one telecommunications data centres across APAC. Ravi and his team will be instrumental in extending that footprint into the adjacent IP switching, routing and convergence spaces."

Last week Juniper Networks Australia announced the appointment of Albert Saunig and Arthur Iliakopolous as major account executives for the service provider business. Alex Krawchuk, Juniper's director for service provider business in Australia, said: "Now that there is some certainty around the NBN project, many service providers are turning to Juniper to help them build networks that can deliver high value content and services innovation. Albert and Arthur will help us capitalise on this opportunity, bringing a wealth of experience in this market.

Juniper and Brocade both target all sectors of the networking market, but have arrived at that position from opposite ends of the spectrum. Juniper started life more than a decade ago focussed on the service provider networking market, and expanded into enterprise networking. With the announcement of the Stratus project in early 2009 it set it sights on the data centre network market.

The goal of Stratus is to reduce the traditional three layers of data centre network architectures to one. Juniper announced a three-to-two reduction in May last year with its 'virtual chassis' technology. Announced of the first products that will reduce the network to single layer is expected sometime this year.

Meanwhile, Brocade announced last November the first product built around its Ethernet Fabric technology designed to meet the demands of virtualised data centre networks, where traditional ethernet networking architectures are struggling to cope. The company released the VDX 6720 family of 10 gigabit ethernet data centre switches, claiming that they "eliminate the need for spanning tree protocol, collapsing the access and aggregation networking layers to create a flat, multipath, deterministic network that is ideal for virtualised environments."