Happy Birthday, Ethernet

By David Strauss, vice president of marketing, Optimum Lightpath.

This week marks the 35th anniversary of the day Ethernet’s founding father, Bob Metcalfe of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, delivered a memo outlining how to connect the think tank's new personal computers to a shared printer. The memo put forth the basic properties of -- and named -- Ethernet. What started as a memo and a rough schematic has evolved into a proven industry standard and opened the doors for an entirely new breed of network – carrier-class Ethernet.

Enterprises' reliance on bandwidth-hungry ERP, CRM, BI, video conferencing, VoIP, e-mail and messaging applications is growing exponentially. The need for network security, speed and storage has never been greater. This is where Carrier Ethernet comes in. Carrier Ethernet can handle bandwidth speeds of 10mbps through 10gbps, ensuring the network can handle whatever bandwidth needs enterprises can throw at it -- now and in the future.

Additionally, carrier-class Ethernet networks, such as our Intelligent Enterprise Network, are turning capacity and security headaches into predictability and business value. An added layer of intelligence provides packet prioritization to a self-healing architecture to business applications that provide real business value versus commodity pipes.

So we say, Happy Birthday Ethernet, and thank you Mr. Metcalfe for establishing the foundation for what is rapidly becoming the intelligent choice and ideal technology for enterprise networks.

David Strauss is vice president of marketing at Optimum Lightpath, a provider of metro Ethernet services in the Northeast United States. Previously, he was worldwide program director of partner marketing for IBM's systems and technology group, and has held senior marketing positions at Sprint PCS, AT&T Wireless services and American Express.