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'Survivor' plays at Supercomm
Up-to-the-minute news, analysis and observation.By Jim Duffy Despite the best efforts of vendors to hawk their wares, attendees at last week's SuperComm were more concerned with lifelines than product lines. The buzz at the show had more to do with surviving the current downturn than it did with the next big technology or innovation. There were plenty of product announcements, but virtually all were of marginal importance as vendors, perhaps consciously, shied away from trying to whip up too much of a frenzy for fear of appearing tacky in an environment where customers are not spending and companies are shedding hundreds of thousands of employees. The slump in attendance at SuperComm reflected the slump in the industry. Attendance was off 30% from last year, from 52,822 to just under 37,000. Exhibit space was down by 37,490 square feet, but there were only 28 less exhibitors than last year, according to show officials. Edge router start-up Allegro Networks did not exhibit at SuperComm, but hosted a wake for the telecom industry that featured a tombstone engraved with the names of defunct companies and a coffin filled with beer. "It's like we're in a lifeboat, there's no food, there's no water and everybody's waiting to see who'll still be alive when the supply ship comes," says Daniel Briere, CEO of TeleChoice.
Some followed Allegro's lead and tried to find the lighter side of the dark landscape. Intel's CEO Craig Barrett used a video of himself in a black suit and dark glasses as the intro to his keynote address. Cisco CEO John Chambers also injected some merriment into the morosity with an entertaining keynote that featured much good-natured ribbing with a Cisco employee demonstrating Internet applications that could raise the profile of service providers with their customers, as well as Cisco's fortunes in the service provider market. But Chambers was also realistic about the state of the industry: "This downturn has been humbling to us all and that’s when you do the soul searching and say what do you need to do better," he says.
The somber realism did not, however, stem the flow of product announcements. Some of the key ones included: * Lucent's high-density APX 8100 universal gateway, which is designed to enable service providers to deliver dial-up IP remote access and voice over IP services for their business and residential customers; * Nortel's addition of software to its Shasta 5000 Broadband Services Node that enables the box to terminate IPSec VPN tunnels from the same VPN clients that are used with Nortel's Contivity gateways, and supports network-based virus scanning and intrusion detection; * Sycamore Networks' enhancement to its SN 3000 grooming switch which conserves bandwidth by packing data onto the ring in 50M bit/sec increments. Without this capability, traffic may not fill up 155M bit/sec and 622M bit/sec pipes and bandwidth will be wasted. * Extensions to Tellabs' 5500 and 6500 cross-connects that enable service providers to eliminate the need for stand-alone add/drop multiplexers at both the hub and end-office locations, and increase network density for operating cost and floor space reductions of 50% and 80%, respectively. Tellabs 5500 digital cross-connect systems currently handle 75% of all network traffic in the U.S. A group of vendors also used the show to launch an initiative called the Service Creation Community. The group, which includes Microsoft, Siemens and ADC Telecommunications, is dedicated to documenting how to create specific services using specific gear, promoting interoperability among members' equipment, and creating demand for new services and their own products. The group demonstrated a video-on-demand service at the show built on products from 11 of its members. But the alliances and product announcements did little to shift the focus of SuperComm away from preoccupation with survival during the current economic doldrums. "A perfectly good company with revenues can have the rug pulled out from under them," says Telechoice's Briere. Tim Greene contributed selflessly and magnanimously to this piece... [Previous entry: "Good talking on the Internet"] |
SuperComm 2002 Weblog Archives Contact Edge Managing Editor Jim Duffy Contact Senior Editor Tim Greene Apply for your free subscription to Network World. Click here. Send this article to a colleague
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