Integral Nabs Bell Labs Vet

AT&T still a fountain of industry knowledge
By Joe McGarvey

The recent news regarding the proposed split up of AT&T is in some ways simply a more dramatic and organized example of the divestiture of the company's intellectual property that has been going on for years.

While the split will mean the birth of three new companies with ties to Ma Bell, the truth is that dozens, maybe hundreds of new companies carry some sort of AT&T imprint as the result of the steady migration of long-time Bell Labs executive into the startup community.

The most recent expatriate of the research wing of Lucent Technologies and the former research division of AT&T is Jack Cicon, who was most recently in charge of Lucent's multi-service access division. Cicon, a 30-year-veteran of Bell Labs, today officially begins his new career as the president and chief executive officer of Integral Access, a maker of IP-based access products.

"My objective is in turning ideas in early development into full-blown products and build a company with regular product releases and full support facilities," says Cicon, who says that he left Bell Labs for the opportunity to try something different.

Integral is one of several companies that are focusing on building equipment for the access portion of the network that enables service providers to both reduce reliance on traditional Sonet gear and to create new services. The unique part of Integral's charter is that unlike the majority of similar players, which base products on ATM technology, Integral is committed to IP.

The company makes both an Integrated Access Device that sits on the customer premise and converts voice signals to packets and a central office type device that aggregates incoming traffic and moves it to the core of the network.

In addition to Cicon's appointment, Integral also announced the addition of fiber optic interfaces, a move that will enable the company's IAD to map services directly onto optical data paths. Equipment makers are steadily increasing the correspondence between IP services and the optical backbone. In addition to Integral, Nortel Networks, Redback Networks, Unisphere Networks and Lucent, with the purchase of Spring Tide Networks, have made moves to more tightly tie services to optical channels. The major motivation behind this trend is to provider IP services, such as VPNs, to larger enterprises, which are not likely to outsource mission-critical processes to a service provider unless that service provider can provider broadband pipes bigger than cable modems or DSL connections.

Integral Access is also an interesting company in that it advocates the use of Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) technology as a means of turning IP-based services into industrial-strength applications that can be delivered with guaranteed reliability and performance. But again, Integral is unique in that it favors the creation of an MPLS-based link on the customer premise. Many of the other companies pushing MPLS as a method of running legacy services across an IP core, such as Vivace, Tenor Networks and Unisphere Networks, are calling for the creation of MPLS paths at the outer edge of the Internet core.

The major benefit of using MPLS - regardless of where it is applied - as a mechanism for converging services and traffic types onto an IP backbone is the eventual elimination for service providers to operate parallel networks that are dedicated to a specific service. Even ATM equipment makers, such as Marconi Communications and Alcatel, which recently purchased Newbridge Networks, are promoting support for MPLS as a path to a unified IP backbone.