Lucent stakes claim to enterprise nets

Murray Hill, N.J. - Lucent Technologies, Inc. last week made its long-anticipated entry into the enterprise data switching market with a family of home-grown ATM products.

The flagship offering is the Lucent MX 1000, an ATM multiservice switch that can alternatively serve as an enterprise- or carrier edge-switch. The 10G bit/sec nonblocking device has 14 slots, each providing 622M bit/sec of bandwidth.

The company also unveiled a campus backbone switch, two access concentrators and an ATM card for its high-end PBX.

Bill O'Shea, president of Lucent's Business Communications Systems Group, said the Lucent is beginning what it hopes is a march into the upper ranks of the internetwork market. "We're not going to get there in any one announcement," O'Shea conceded. But he said Lucent also is developing products for the Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet markets, and he confirmed reports that Lucent is working on its own Ethernet switch for delivery about a year from now.

Last week's coming-out party was not the first time Lucent has announced a strategy to attack the enterprise network market. The difference is this time Lucent is building its own products and placing them in categories recognizable to network IS buyers. "This is what everybody's been waiting for Lucent to say for a year," said Peter Bernstein, president of Infonautics Consulting, Inc., a research firm in Ramsey, N.J.

Previously, Lucent principally resold routers, switches and hubs from Bay Networks, Inc. When it has offered customer premises data products, they have tended to be specialized gear such as the Multimedia Communications Exchange server, which sits between a PBX and an Ethernet switch to provide telephony call control instructions to a real-time data-conferencing or videoconferencing session.

One way Lucent is trying to differentiate its new MX 1000 is by supporting the connection admission control (CAC) algorithm developed by Lucent's Bell Laboratories unit. Lucent claims CAC can boost the effective throughput of voice and data traffic over variable bit rate circuits and other ATM service classes.

The goal is to provide traffic-engineering efficiencies that save carriers and users money when they are using a unified voice and data network infrastructure, said Susan Barbier, Lucent's market development director for data networking.

Also employing the CAC algorithm is the campus backbone switch, the AX 500. Bell Labs designed the AX 500 to support virtual LANs with the help of engineers from Agile Networks, Inc., a VLAN company purchased by Lucent last year.

Analysts and competitors said Lucent still has a long road ahead of it. Officials with Lucent rival Northern Telecom, Inc. - which runs neck-and-neck with Lucent in its primary markets of PBXs and central office telephone switches - said the new MX 1000 offers many of the same multiservice characteristics of Nortel Magellan ATM and frame relay switches. Nortel claims to have sold 6,000 Magellan switches to users and carriers since 1994.

"They have a long way to go to catch up," said Mark Tharby, group marketing manager for Nortel Magellan.

And the initial market still may be limited. Lucent's switches are likely to be of most interest to network managers looking to integrate voice and video applications on their LANs and wide-area data networks, rather than simply buying more raw bandwidth for the campus, said Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corp., a Voorhees, N.J. technology assessment firm.

But Nortel already has sewn up key commerical accounts such as Sprint Corp., which recently installed 38 Magellan Passports. Tharby suggested that Lucent may be aiming to dislodge Cisco Systems, Inc.'s StrataCom broadband switches as the frame relay backbone of Lucent's old parent, AT&T. Already the dominant supplier of AT&T's central office telephony switches, O'Shea said, "we certainly would like to be a major [data-switching] supplier to AT&T."

Lucent officials acknowledge the ATM interface card for the Definity PBX is not expected to be widely adopted by Lucent's huge PBX installed base. Its main purpose would be to hand off voice traffic in native ATM cell format to campus backbone and WAN ATM switches such as Lucent's own new boxes.

Barbier said the Definity ATM also could be used by large call centers that use the Definity as an automatic call distributor for hundreds or thousands of agents, while simultaneously pulling in customer data to populate the agents' screens via computer-telephone integration.