Network Magazine Reprint

Ours is an industry of constant innovation. New ideas invigorate information technology and enable a faster, more flexible information architecture. Of course, innovation on its own means nothing unless it can be harnessed to deliver new or improved business strategies. The best innovations align technological creativity with business needs to create a business-optimized IT network. It’s in this spirit that the editors of Network Magazine have come together to honor the most important and creative innovations of the year.

For the past five months, we’ve scoured the industry searching for the most important innovations and in the end came up with 30 winners. Each earned their place either through market influence, sheer vision, or by meeting critical needs with the smartest combination of capabilities and price. Out of this collection of products, we’ve also chosen two standouts, one as the Innovation of the Year, and the other as the Most Innovative Start-up.

Collectively, the 30 winners provide a glimpse into the future of IT. We see through them an information infrastructure that reaches far beyond the confines of the traditional corporation to encompass partners, customers, and mobile workers. It’s an information infrastructure that can be tweaked and optimized for any application a business might require. Ultimately, it’s an architecture where technology is 100 percent-aligned with business needs—in essence, a business-optimized IT infrastructure.

Convergence and mobility are spawning wide-ranging innovations in the way service providers connect remote users and central offices with one another. VoIP services are giving IT managers new ways of delivering telephony and communications services to their users, while wireless and high-speed Ethernet services are transforming the types of applications that are available to both road warriors and remote office workers.

Global Ethernet
Wi-Fi is required in the sky, but on the ground Ethernet reigns supreme. Masergy Communications broke through the ranks in this space by delivering one of the first global Ethernet services.

Masergy’s Intelligent Transport service provides Ethernet via serial connections at speeds of 1.5 to 155Mbps. Network managers can choose between Private IP, based on RFC 2547-compliant VPNs; Public IP, the company’s Internet service; Private Link, its layer-3 service connecting sites via simulated point-to-point links; and the Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS), a layer-2 IP VPN service based on the IETF’s VPLS draft. Five levels of QoS are also provided for accommodating voice, video, and data on a common link.

Executive Editor David Greenfield can be reached at dgreenfield@cmp.com.