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Native Networks Sets its Sights on Europe’s Optical Edge Market
Added: (Thu Oct 04 2001)
Revolutionary Value and Services over an Evolutionary Platform
London, UK, 4th October 2001 – Native Networks, a developer of innovative solutions for the Metro Access market, today unveiled its strategy for transforming the services relationships between carriers and enterprises. Native has created a solution to bridge the gap between enterprise demand for high-speed affordable network access and carriers’ demands for preserving the cash flows from legacy traffic, whilst capturing the growth of high-speed data services – all over the same evolving network.
As part of its European strategy, Native has set up its Global Business and Commercial HQ in London, UK, whilst preserving its extensive R&D strengths in Israel. And with a proven management team including Steve Harbour, CEO (former marketing director for Cisco Photonics) and Steve McCaffery, vice president of sales (former vice president of the optical network group at Lucent Technologies), combined with the technology expertise of founders Dr. Gilad Goren, President and Menahem Kaplan, CTO, it has a wealth of knowledge and experience of the optical access market. Native is also active in the US where it is concentrating its sales efforts through key alliances and OEM partnerships with leading optical networking vendors.
Commenting on its European plans, Steve Harbour, CEO, explained “ The current economic climate has swept away the “everything over IP revolution” protagonists – there simply isn’t the business case today or in the foreseeable future for a fork lift replacement of the existing network. Legacy networks today are an asset to be sweated and our technology does just that. Our highly innovative design and architecture provides a great formula for both the carriers and businesses. For businesses we provide very low cost packet-based and circuit switched services, together with fast and precise bandwidth and class of service provisioning – including compliance with and verification of data Service Level Agreements. And for the carriers we provide very high levels of data aggregation which delivers more revenue per fibre or wavelength, much more profitable data services by providing data SLAs, low-cost layer 2 based VPN services. We also provide what the carriers increasingly demand - a platform that mixes voice and data traffic in an evolution-friendly continuum, with continuous agile evolution from voice-intensive to data-intensive payloads without any need to change out any of the technologies.
Harbour is optimistic about future market growth and Native’s ability to succeed. “We are in the sweet spot of the market, aggregating voice and data traffic seamlessly into optical access solutions and providing an answer to what has been one of the most intractable challenges in recent years – linking the world’s major enterprises at the network edge to the high-bandwidth, low-cost connectivity in the network core. Our platforms do this in a way that satisfies both the cost, footprint and carrier-class engineering requirements of the carriers and the service flexibility and Ethernet-like pricing expected by the enterprises. Harbour continued, “Recent figures forecast that the optical access market is set to reach $5.5 billion by 2003, from a base of less than $1 billion today. This is a clear sign that carriers are planning to invest in the last piece of the bandwidth jigsaw - the access layer. Bandwidth intensive enterprise LANs will continue to merge with public WANs and carriers are looking for a simple, cost-effective and forecast-tolerant approach to ‘glue’ these together. This is where Native will win.”
Designed to offer the simplicity of Ethernet combined with the reliability of SDH/SONET, Native Networks’ Asynchronous Packet Transport technology extends the intelligence of the metro core all the way to the enterprise edge, providing carriers and service providers with a high-speed, cost effective and reliable access platform to connect large enterprises, SMEs and Multi Tenanted Units to the abundant capacity available in the core of the metro network. This evolutionary solution combines Ethernet with SDH/SONET using MPLS based (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) intelligent multiplexing technology. MPLS has been getting a lot of news recently as the way packet traffic can be “policed” to provide differentiated services for data, but Native uses MPLS in a new way, as the intelligent layer or “glue” between Ethernet and SDH/SONET, unleashing a host of new deliverables in high-level aggregation, fast provisioning, radical economics and new value-added services.
The company will be offering its high-speed optical edge solutions to European carriers and service providers, enabling them to aggregate more edge traffic, both packet and circuit, onto a single fibre or, through established interoperability trials with other vendors, onto a single Metro WDM wavelength. This allows carriers to optimise bandwidth utilisation, deliver more services and serve more paying customers over the same equipment and infrastructure, thereby delivering a fast return on investment and increased revenue streams.
A protocol agnostic platform, Native Networks’ solution aggregates various layer 2 protocols such as Ethernet, Frame Relay, IP, and TDM ,in their native format, onto high-speed optical transmission platforms, without the need for protocol conversion, generating further cost savings for carriers.
Native Networks has secured seed and first round funding from prominent North American and European venture capital firms. The company has also formed several interoperability partnerships with optical networking vendors, including Sorrento Networks and LuxN.
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About Native Networks
Native Networks is a leading developer of high-speed transport solutions for optical access networks that deliver all protocols, packets and circuits in their native form. Native Networks' innovative traffic-management technologies and service-aware network management solutions enable carriers to build multiple secure and elastic Virtual Ethernet Networks (VENs) supporting native transport of Ethernet packets alongside legacy TDM circuits over SDH/SONET and DWDM infrastructure.
The company's advanced, patent-pending multiplexing scheme enables optimal use of optical infrastructure with guaranteed QoS per customer and ironclad SLA. Founded in 1999, Native Networks is funded by several North American and European venture capital funds including Anschutz Investment Company, Apax Partners Israel, Israel Seed Partners, JVP, SkyPoint Capital Corporation and Soros Private Equity Partners. The company is headquartered in London, UK and retains extensive research and development facilities in Petah Tikva, Israel.
For further information please contact:
Company contact:
Aliza Ohayon
Native Networks
Tel: +972 3 920 2822
Email: aliza.ohayon@nativenetworks.com
Press contact:
Mark Waite/Gemma Thomas
Multimedia PRM
Tel: +44 (0) 207 470 8777
Email: mailto:markw@multimediapr.co.uk / mailto:gemmat@multimediapr.co.uk