Carly Suppa

With the economy in the pits, even major telecom equipment players have found it increasingly difficult to stay with product lines. In the service provider market, hardware providers like Lucent and Tellabs have recently abandoned their PathStar and Salix product lines, which has left some service providers stuck.

When the Privacy Practice at New York-based PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) found that auditing company Web sites manually was getting to be a virtually impossible feat, the company sought a technological means to automate the process. Teaming with Ottawa-based Watchfire Corporation, the two companies recently developed WebCPO privacy management software.

Canadians continue to have issues with outsourcing hosting responsibilities.

Last month, Salt Lake City-based EmergeCore Networks announced that it has developed the answer to the demands of service providers looking for new value-added applications and services to retain customers and generate revenue.

The problem with 10-gigabit Ethernet, according to Lauri Vickers, senior analyst with the data and voice networking group at Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Cahners In-Stat Group, is that although it is going to be one of the fastest technologies available, when using multimode fibre, distance is limited.

If there is one thing analysts can agree on when it comes to Nortel Networks Corp. it is that the last 12 months have been less than impressive. The Brampton, Ont.-based company has taken a beating in the stock market and currently has some 20,000 layoffs in the works. Nortel also announced last month that it has abandoned its line of products for DSL providers, which it invested nearly US$800 million last year.

Responding to customer needs for flexibility and scalability, Paris-based Alcatel said release two of its routing switch platform is designed to facilitate the use of multi-service edge applications.

Although there are numerous products designed to aid IT administrators in the management of their networks, power...