NEC Launches 'BlueFire'

IRVING, Texas -- Sparked by surging market acceptance of NEC Corporation's data infrastructure products in Asia, NEC America, Inc. (NEC) today announced the North American release of BlueFire™, the first family of enterprise IP routers and switches that implement IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) as well as IPv4 in hardware.The BlueFire solutions provide NEC resellers with a LAN/WAN data offering that is integrated with NEC's IP telephony products to offer customers end-to-end IP converged solutions. BlueFire IP products constitute the data infrastructure elements of NEC's Enterprise Open Network (NEON), the company's architecture for converged networking that delivers the functionality, investment protection, proven reliability and performance of NEC's traditional voice platforms."We first deployed these converged solutions in Japan where we are an established market leader and where the limited availability of IP addresses makes the requirement for IPv6 more urgent," said Shuichi Hashimoto, vice president and general manager of the Marketing and Sales Support Division of NEC America's Corporate Networks Group. "Now that they have been running successfully there for almost a year, we are introducing them as the BlueFire family into theNorth American market, where the need for end-to-end converged infrastructures is growing rapidly. Users can implement IPv4 now and migrate to IPv6 as business needs dictate."NEC Corp.