TANDBERG has just launched the EX90, a revolutionary personal telepresence solution that extends the award-winning TANDBERG Telepresence in-person experience to individuals at their desks or home offices.

Munzer Aloush, TANDBERG Regional Manager for the Gulf, Iraq, & Pakistan, said the global launch of the EX90 has caused great excitement in the Middle East.

“The EX90 integrates the superior audio and visual quality and signature touch screen interface of TANDBERG Telepresence into a sleek desktop solution that will change the way executives and experts communicate and collaborate,” Aloush said.

“Business driven by emails and phone calls is a thing of the past. Today’s executives do not have time to wait for answers, or to be misunderstood. They must be able to connect face-to-face with anyone at anytime, at a moment’s notice, to accelerate decisions and drive business in real time,” said Fredrik Halvorsen, TANDBERG CEO. “The EX90 enables executives to engage with customers, experts and employees as if they were sitting across the desk. This highly versatile system is built for the executive experience – with a sleekly designed large HD display for natural interaction that is also incredibly simple to use.”

The EX90 easily connects in full 1080p30 resolution to any standards-based video or telepresence system with TANDBERG inTouch, a first-of-its-kind 8” touch screen interface. Based on the signature TANDBERG Telepresence touch screen technology, inTouch simplifies making video calls, sharing content and accessing advanced features with the glide of a finger, eliminating the need for a remote. Moreover, the EX90 has MultiSite, which allows executives to add two other participants to any call and the large 24” HD screen ensures they are easily viewable. The EX90 can seamlessly double as a PC monitor and has a handset for audio, streamlining executives’ communications and their desks.

"TANDBERG's new EX90 sets new standards for personal Telepresence on the desktop. It’s a natural extension of the immersive TANDBERG Telepresence Suites. We rely on TANDBERG Telepresence and HD video conferencing for instant ‘in-person’ access to drive critical meetings and make decisions,” said Steve Henderson, Program Manager  for Varian Medical Systems, the world's leading manufacturer of medical devices and software for treating cancer and other medical conditions. “Connecting and collaborating from my desk in the same high quality is very easy and intuitive with inTouch. The advanced features and similarity to other familiar touch screen technology puts everything I need for a rich experience right at my fingertips helping me to accomplish much more than if I was just on a conference call, or even traditional video conferencing.” 

For a tailored total collaboration experience, users have the flexibility to add a second monitor to the EX90 to preserve the face-to-face personal telepresence experience while sharing data or multimedia at the same time on the other screen. In addition to capturing high-definition video, the built in PrecisionHD Camera tilts 90 degrees enabling users to share sketches, blueprints, X-rays and other documents, as well as objects like fabric swatches or models. Combined with the ability to easily add cameras, multimedia devices and other peripherals, the EX90 is an ideal solution for true collaboration in any industry setting.

“Telepresence isn’t just about the room set up or number of screens. It’s about the ability to reproduce the valued characteristics of a face-to-face meeting or other similar form of direct human interaction,” said Dominic Dodd, Frost & Sullivan. “The EX90 does this by bringing the high-quality, natural experience of TANDBERG Telepresence to the desktop in a very attractive solution that makes communicating with other video and telepresence users simple. It also incorporates familiar business collaboration tools and features to streamline the overall experience and help drive efficiencies.”

The EX90 is currently available for purchase. For more information, please visit www.TANDBERG.com or contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .  Stay up-to-date on the latest TANDBERG news on Twitter and Facebook.

As part of evolving its satellite maritime offerings, Thuraya is developing an advanced broadband terminal for the maritime industry in partnership with Comtech. The new terminal, which is designed and built with leading market technology, is set for launch in September of this year.

The Comtech maritime terminal will provide high-quality voice services as well as a broadband service that reaches a speed of up to 444 kbps. Users will also be able to access high-speed video-streaming at speeds of 384 kbps at sea. The competitiveness of the new solution lies in its compact size and cost-effectiveness to meet the needs of the enterprise sector, especially in the maritime market.

Complying with all maritime standards, the new solution has a separate, small omni-directional antenna that ensures high-quality connectivity to the satellite regardless of vessel movements.

“The Comtech broadband solution has the strengths and features of both Thuraya’s superior and congestion-free satellite network along with Comtech’s technology and product know-how,” said Thuraya’s Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Yousuf Al Sayed.

Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ: RVBD), the IT infrastructure performance company for networks, applications and storage, has announced the Riverbed® Steelhead®  7050 model wide area network (WAN) optimization appliance. To deliver unmatched performance, flexibility and fault tolerance in large data centers and private cloud environments, the Steelhead 7050 model appliance combines new levels of bandwidth and TCP session scalability with solid-state drives (SSD) and 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE). This powerful new appliance efficiently scales to meet the performance, reliability and flexibility requirements of large enterprises and allows them to more cost-effectively manage large-scale data center-to-data center replication, accelerate applications among many locations and users in an enterprise, and build large private cloud infrastructures.

The Steelhead 7050 is the first WAN optimization appliance where the persistent data store is 100% resident on SSDs, minimizing disk access times and latency to allow it to deliver the speed necessary to handle extreme work loads. The Steelhead 7050 optimizes up to 100,000 concurrent optimized TCP connections and up to one Gigabit per second WAN-side throughput, and utilizes up to four 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) network interface cards. 

 Ciena^® Corporation, the network specialist, has announced the successful completion of its acquisition of substantially all of the optical networking and Carrier Ethernet assets of Nortel’s⁺ Metro Ethernet Networks (MEN) business.

The $773.8 million (USD) aggregate purchase price for the acquisition consists entirely of cash. The purchase price is subject to adjustment based upon the level of net working capital transferred to Ciena at closing, which is currently estimated to result in a downward adjustment to the aggregate purchase price of approximately $62 million (USD). In accordance with the asset sale agreement, prior to the closing Ciena elected to replace the $239 million (USD) in convertible notes that were to be issued as part of the aggregate purchase price with cash equivalent to 102% of the face amount of the notes replaced, or $243.8 million (USD).

“The acquisition of these assets accelerates Ciena’s overall strategy and gives us stronger operating leverage to continue investing in innovation that will allow us to deliver on our vision for next-generation networks,” said Gary Smith, Ciena’s president and CEO. “With broader geographic reach, deeper customer relationships and a stronger portfolio of solutions, we’re confident that this acquisition positions Ciena for faster growth.”

Ciena already has completed several important milestones in its comprehensive integration plan, and remains focused on ensuring a smooth transition for the benefit of both customers and employees. Specifically:

• Ciena has selected its senior management and extended leadership teams and defined their areas of responsibility and accountability, and identified and confirmed substantially all of the organizational structure to the extent permitted by applicable law.
• Nearly 100 percent of the employment offers Ciena has extended to Nortel MEN employees have been accepted, including a significant number in management positions.
• Ciena has ensured that upon closing the applicable Nortel customer and supply contracts will successfully transition to Ciena.
• Philippe Morin, previously president of Nortel MEN, has been appointed Ciena’s Senior Vice President, Global Products Group.
• The vision for the transformed product portfolio has been determined, and a comprehensive portfolio update will be announced March 22, 2010. 

Smith continued, “As we unite these two organizations, we are emphasizing performance in every aspect of the business and are organizing the newly-transformed Ciena to ensure we remain operationally efficient and financially strong. Staying true to our specialist roots, Ciena is now the only global supplier exclusively focused on converged optical Ethernet as a foundation for the next generation of service-and application-driven networks – creating a true industry leader.”

A number of existing Ciena and Nortel MEN customers and partners have commented on the completion of this acquisition, including:

• Tim Harden, President, Supply Chain and Fleet Operations, AT&T, said: “We believe that consolidation of optical networking and Carrier Ethernet assets will accelerate innovation and speed to market for new technologies and network solutions. Our goal is to ensure that each investment in network infrastructure accelerates our move towards a network that enables the full promise of the Internet and other game-changing technologies.” 
• Phil Male, Chief Strategy Officer at Cable & Wireless Worldwide, said: “We’ve worked with both Nortel and Ciena historically, and the coming together of these two businesses is a logical fit – I’m sure we’ll enjoy a strong relationship with the combined business going forward.”
• Bill Teuber, Vice Chairman, at EMC Corporation, said: "EMC and Ciena have a long history of partnering together to provide industry-leading information infrastructure solutions to our customers around the world. Ciena's acquisition of these well-established networking assets will help EMC and Ciena provide a broader range of solutions for our joint customers.”
• Paul Frizado, Chief Technology & Information Officer at MTS Allstream, said: “As a partner to both Ciena and Nortel’s MEN group, we’ve had a front row seat to the exciting possibilities this deal represents in terms of advancing networking through innovative technology. We view this as an opportunity to work with a strategic industry partner to continue to build a simpler, more cost-effective network that can reliably deliver compelling services, applications and content to our residential and business customers across Canada.”
• Consuelo Gómez Colín, COO of Telmex said: “We are pleased to see Nortel’s optical and Carrier Ethernet assets land with Ciena. The combination of these two industry leaders offers us an even stronger and more capable partner for bringing the best in network innovation to our customers.”

“We remain committed to providing stability, continuity of supply and innovation to our customers through individualized, high-touch attention. This will ensure that we remain a trusted partner in evolving networks and enabling our customers to create new and differentiated services to capture market share,” said Mike Aquino, senior vice president, global field organization at Ciena.

To further extend usage of its high-speed data solution, “Thuraya IP” for key market segments, Thuraya has introduced a new antenna solution allowing efficient usage of data communications in moving vehicles.

“Comms on the Move” is a very compact and light-weight antenna, which can easily be roof-mounted on any vehicle. It is a two-axis antenna which efficiently allows 444 kbps Standard IP and 384 kbps Streaming IP services while vehicles move even at high speeds.

The Thuraya IP “Comms on the Move” antenna is the smallest in the industry to accomplish high speed connectivity and one of Thuraya’s key solutions and products on display at Satellite 2010 which is currently taking place in Washington. 

Explosive network resource and bandwidth requirements from server virtualization and cloud networking are driving demand for higher performance Ethernet switches in managed/hosted data centers and enterprise data centers. Extreme Networks, Inc. has responded with its next-generation data center vision for migrating to virtualized data centers and new infrastructure solutions that feature market-leading scalability, performance and simplicity.

Hosting companies and enterprises alike are scaling their data centers to realize the benefits of a virtualized infrastructure and cloud networking, where resources can be dynamically managed and deployed, and space and energy efficiency are key requirements.  Because the physical network is the foundation for virtualization, it is vital that it be highly scalable, demonstrating robust performance, capacity and capabilities to support large table sizes that accommodate growth. Increased performance of the physical network enables the data center network to support varied environments characterized by a rapidly expanding number of virtual machines and very large numbers of users within a small footprint.