Two startup companies emerged from stealth mode Monday to explain the market they're addressing and provide glimpses into the service provider products they are developing.
Atrica and Crescent Networks disclosed their individual concepts for enabling service providers to provision a new class of IP services to enterprise users. The high-level conceptual views are intended to serve as appetizers for upcoming product launches from these companies.
Atrica is focusing on metropolitan-area optical Ethernet, while Crescent is attempting to ease collaboration between an enterprise and the handful of IP service providers the enterprise may subscribe to.
Atrica's mission is to supply carriers with high-speed optical Ethernet platforms so they can deliver "scalable" transmission services more rapidly. The company is attempting to encourage carriers to cap their investments in SONET and time-division-multiplexing technology and adopt optical Ethernet for their future voice and data service provisioning requirements and revenue opportunities.
The company's products will aggregate Ethernet access pipes -- from 10M bit/sec to multiples of 10G bit/sec -- from residential, small and large business, and carrier central offices, for transmission over high-speed optical Ethernet metropolitan-area spurs running in the hundreds of gigabits. Atrica's products will implement Multiprotocol Label and Lambda Switching and DiffServ to engineer traffic, deliver quality of service, and attempt to provision and monitor service-level agreements.
The switches will also attempt to equal or surpass SONET's reliability. SONET networks recover in 50 milliseconds, Atrica officials say.
Atrica is not alone in developing optical Ethernet. Earlier this year, Extreme Networks rolled out the Alpine optical Ethernet switch line, which is in use by service provider Yipes.
Atrica products are in trials at France Telecom SA and two other undisclosed carriers. They will ship by the end of the year, company officials say.
The company was spun off from 3Com Corp., which has a US$4 million stake in Atrica. 3Com CEO Eric Benhamou is on the Atrica board, and Atrica is sourcing Ethernet technology from 3Com. Atrica also has another $16 million in venture funding from Benchmark Capital, Accel Partners and France Telecom. The company's CEO is Avinoam Rubinstain, formerly 3Com's general manager of WAN Router and ATM products in 3Com's Large Enterprise division in Santa Clara, Calif.
Crescent is led by Gerald Wesel, a founder of Agile Networks, acquired by Lucent Technologies Inc. two years ago. Crescent's management team also includes former executives from EMC, Fore Systems and Nortel Networks Corp. Crescent has $13 million in funding from Comdisco debt financing.
Crescent is developing products designed to essentially add a layer of abstraction between the varied infrastructures, technologies and service offerings of different service provider networks that an enterprise may subscribe to. The company's goal is to do for routed IP networks what dense wave division multiplexing did for fiber networks: increase capacity and enable dynamic provisioning.
Crescent calls its approach "dense virtual routed networking" (DVRN) for "collaborative" IP services, such as intranets and extranets, hosted applications and content, and bandwidth or service wholesaling provided separately by individual service providers. Crescent's DVRN products will perform WAN routing and switching, and work with VPN gateways and Web switches to enable service providers to logically configure and separate different subscribers' routed IP services within a single product.
"It's a combination of a couple of things, but what it nets out to is enabling collaborative services between the different types of service providers," says Steve Byars, an analyst at Current Analysis in Sterling, Va. "A service provider can wholesale services to other service providers and, on a single platform, make each of those other service providers think and feel like they've got their own router."
A compelling proposition perhaps, but Crescent will be going up against every other router vendor selling to service providers, including giants Cisco, Lucent and Nortel.
Crescent officials would not say when the product will ship. They currently do not have any infield trials.