Fujitsu Goes FASST with Atrica, CoSine, Hammerhead

Fujitsu has begun marketing and offering one-stop support in North America for integrated solutions using any combination its own products and those of its new partners Atrica Inc., CoSine Communications Inc. and Hammerhead Systems Inc. Dubbed FASST (for flexible architecture for subscriber service termination), the initiative is just one of the latest moves by industry vendors to deliver more complete solutions through acquisition of or cooperation with other equipment suppliers.

“Fujitsu wants to branch out from being just an optical transport vendor to become much more relevant to service providers,” says Rodney Boehm, senior vice president of FASST business development at Fujitsu, which plans to bring additional vendors into the program going forward.

FASST is specifically targeted at helping carriers more easily make the transition at their own pace from a TDM to a packet framework by delivering tested, integrated solutions that allow them to offer new services, says Boehm.

Fujitsu’s contribution to FASST includes its optical transport gear as well as its resources and experience in the areas of professional services, operations and maintenance, and network planning and deployment, Boehm says. The company also offers its smaller vendor partners an affiliation with a large, financially stable vendor with strong distribution and the ability to appeal to RBOCs and tier 2 providers in North America. “CoSine has had success in Asia, the U.S. and Europe with a variety of carrier types,” says Sue Almeida, executive director of product and strategic marketing at CoSine. But “the North American market is quite large, and there is ramp up by those carriers, and Fujitsu is strong in customer relations and a lot of customer satisfaction.”

CoSine contributes to FASST its subscriber management tools that allow service providers to deliver value-added services like managed firewalls and virtual VPNs. While the CoSine products can come into play in residential or any size of business application, Almeida notes that the small and medium business market is “critical” for RBOCs. The CoSine product, she says, can allow RBOCs to upsell those SMB customers by adding firewall service to their Internet access for an extra $10 a month, as one example.

Atrica, meanwhile, brings its optical Ethernet products to FASST. “Atrica helps service providers develop Ethernet-based infrastructure to take the cost out of the network, deliver profitable services and create new services service providers haven’t been able to deliver profitably to date,” says Umesh Kukreja, director of product marketing at Atrica, whose products can be used in access, aggregation/core ring or mesh networks. “Atrica lets service providers do point to point, and point to multipoint with a committed information rate and backup with 50msec resiliency.”

Startup Hammerhead sells multiservice edge products aimed at helping service providers transition their corporate data services from legacy/ATM to MPLS-based networks in a way that’s nondisruptive and allows them to introduce Ethernet-based services, explains Houman Modarres, director of product management at Hammerhead. While there is a wide array of multiservice edge products on the market, Modarres says Hammerhead’s platform is unique because of its patented bandwidth pooling architecture that allows it to scale up or down and is “an order of magnitude cheaper” than similar solutions by competitors. Hammerhead technology also does service interworking at Layer 2 between ATM, frame relay and Ethernet. And it can do bridge and roll between ATM and MPLS control and data planes without service interruption. “You also need to be services-aware in the control plane, so we need to do a higher level of deep packet inspection,” he says. “So we shunt lower priority traffic at the edge to routers and take high-value traffic and through packet inspection identify” those packets and forward them to platforms like those CoSine offers.

Of course, Fujitsu is just the latest vendor to begin piecing together end-to-end solutions for service providers. Other recent initiatives toward this end include Nortel Networks’ partnerships with access vendors Calix, ECI Telecom and KEYMILE to deliver end-to-end, residential broadband solutions to service providers, and optical vendor CIENA Corp.’s moves to buy access equipment vendor Catena Networks Inc. and optical Ethernet and switching supplier Internet Photonics.

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