August 31, 2004 Pittsburgh, PA-- Marconi has opened a new research and development facility in Lowell, MA, that will focus development on a new platform for a family of products to address the rapidly growing IP services market.
The new center complements ongoing IP engineering work at existing Marconi development centers in both Vienna, Va., and Pittsburgh, and the resulting platform will become the latest in a line of IP and IP-aware products from Marconi that includes such offerings as the BXR-48000 multiservice switch router.
This new carrier-class platform, which will provide virtual private networks in the mission-critical applications typically required by Marconi's customers, is based, in part, on the award-winning technology of Crescent Networks' that Marconi purchased last year. The new platform will include Marconi's network management and quality of service capabilities and will be supported by Marconi's customer service.
More than 20 development engineers will work out of the Lowell facility. Many of the engineers formerly worked for Crescent Networks, and were hired by Marconi, according to a company spokesman.
"Marconi is making a firm commitment to delivering world-class IP service platforms to the marketplace. The creation of this new facility and the engineering and development talent that will staff it is yet another step in that direction," said Dr. James Luciani, who will lead the new development team for Marconi. Luciani was previously chief technical officer and vice president of product management at Crescent.
Marconi's new IP services routing family will use technology from Crescent, a venture-funded startup that closed during the restructuring of the telecommunications industry. That technology, which was used in a routing platform sold to NTT and placed in several other carrier trials, also won a SuperQuest award in the network backbone/edge category at the 2001 SuperComm trade show.
"Customers want IP-based managed services, but they want the services delivered with the same high level of performance and reliability they have come to expect from Marconi," said Joe Pajer, executive vice president and general manager of Marconi's Broadband Routing & Switching group. "The new IP platform being developed by Marconi will deliver these benefits, complementing Marconi's current product line, and help service providers, enterprises and government users make the transition to profitable, high-performance packet networks."