Amongst the companies present at NetEvents were DiVitas and Force 10 Networks. Comms Business spoke with Gordon Young, the DiVitas VP of world-wide sales and asked him what brought him to Barcelona. Young said “Now we have moved from the discovery to the delivery stage, we want to get the message out. The most important news is that we are now shipping product in quantity with over 50 systems installed in the last few months. We have also signed up a number of systems integrators such as ANS, 5i and Telindus to deliver the systems and integrate it with customers’ PABX’s. The future is looking good.”
Force 10 Networks is not yet that well-known in the UK networking business, having been focussed on the somewhat esoteric 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch market, where the main customers are research and development operations, and customers with large data centres. Google is the best known of the latter and CERN, the European home of the Large Electron Collider, installed in a 27 kilometre long tunnel running under France and Switzerland near Geneva is probably the most recognisable of the former.
Stephen Harrison, VP of Marketing for Force 10 said, “We are not resting on our laurels. We want to expand, particularly in the UK, so we have opened a West London office and appointed Zycko as our distributor. We are doing so not just to serve our existing UK customers better, but as the market for server virtualisation takes off (ed: see channel primer on virtualisation April issue) we are positioning ourselves for growth.”