Stories about: Dell'Oro

Enterasys Networks customers should be encouraged that the joint venture between Enterasys owner Gores Group and Siemens strengthens the vendor's product portfolio and financial wherewithal.

Enterasys has found its billion-dollar buy. The company will be combined with Siemens' Enterprise Communications group, of which a controlling interest was acquired this week by The Gores Group, the private equity firm that owns Enterasys. Gores will also include its SER Solutions call center software company in the joint venture.

Enterasys Networks customers should be encouraged that the joint venture between Enterasys owner Gores Group and Siemens strengthens the vendor's product portfolio and financial wherewithal.

Could Enterasys be looking at possibly acquiring rival Extreme Networks? There's been a flurry of speculation on that. Enterasys has made no bones about its intention to acquire a sizable company that will take it close to US$1 billion in annual revenue and better compete with Cisco and new enterprise LAN switch entrant Juniper Networks. Extreme and Enterasys both do about US$350 million in yearly sales.

Juniper Networks makes lots of hay about its single-operating-system approach to high-performance networking -- saying that using JUNOS across its routing, switching and other application-specific platforms lowers cost and eases operations and management.

Despite the hype surrounding VoIP and the technology's proven benefits, some organizations are still taking baby steps toward converged networking.

Alcatel-Lucent this week joined an ongoing announcement party among major router vendors by unveiling significant upgrades to its edge lineup, highlighted by a new chip.

Enterasys is looking to make one or two acquisitions this year in an ambitious effort to increase revenue to US$1 billion -- it isn't close today -- by expanding the company's presence in security and wireless.

HP ProCurve this week unveiled the successor to its 2600 line of edge switches.

Looking to bolster technologies that support bandwidth-heavy applications, such as virtualization, collaboration, unified communications and video, LAN switching vendors are set to roll out a flurry of new products and enhancements, highlighted by Cisco's new data center switch and Juniper's expected rollout of edge, core and data center boxes.

3Com this week is expected to unveil a pair of applications - one for Asterisk VoIP and the other for WAN acceleration/optimization - that run on its MSR series of multiservice routers.