PALO ALTO, Calif. -- Aricent(TM), a global innovation, technology and service company focused exclusively on communications, today announced ISS-Metro(TM), a new release of its market-leading Intelligent Switching Solution (ISS) specifically optimized for carrier and metro Ethernet product development. Aricent's ISS is a licensable, pre-packaged software framework that jumpstarts the development and integration of advanced switching products, and has been selected by more than 35 networking and telecom equipment manufacturers worldwide. According to Infonetics Research, the majority of access and aggregation equipment being deployed by carriers around the world will be IP, Ethernet, and WDM, driving an equipment opportunity of over $20B USD in 2010.

"Aricent's software is one of the industry's best kept secret weapons, providing an extensive collection of standards-based protocol software that manufacturers use in order that their engineering groups can focus on adding value and differentiation. This new release of ISS-Metro adds the just-standardized PBB-TE to complex switching functions that carriers are demanding today," stated Michael Howard, principal analyst at Infonetics Research. "The demand for high-performance Ethernet for enterprise and metro applications is increasing each year, and frameworks such as ISS-Metro support the aggressive schedules, advanced features, and operational assurance customers want."

Aricent's ISS-Metro is targeted at networking and telecom equipment manufacturers building products and services to deploy high performance Ethernet in access, aggregation, edge and transport equipment. These deployments range from greenfield build-outs to replacement of ATM and SONET infrastructure. Applications include FTTH, FTTC, Ethernet DSL access, MSAN, mobile backhaul/cellular backhaul and VPNs over packet infrastructure.

The ISS-Metro release offers advanced spanning tree algorithms, Ethernet Operations, Administration and Management (OAM) capabilities, Ethernet in the First Mile (EFM), Provider Backbone Bridges (PBB), Provider Backbone Bridge Traffic Engineering (PBB-TE), virtualization of switching components, fault tolerant high availability, and Ethernet protection switching. Aricent also offers MPLS as an add-on to the ISS-Metro package.

Aricent Inc.