Acacia signs veteran networking sales force in North America to bring third generation switching to end users and resellers.LOWELL, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 16, 1996-- Former Cisco, Crescendo and Grand Junction Grand Junction, city (1990 pop. 29,034), seat of Mesa co., W Colo., at the junction of the Gunnison and Colorado rivers; inc. 1891. The shipping and processing center of a large ranch and irrigated farm region, it also serves the area's uranium, oil shale, gas, and sales channel to exclusively sell Acacia's NovaSwitch family of Fast, Adaptive switches Acacia Networks has won exclusive contracts to become the sole switch provider for a consortium of 13 firms comprising the industry's largest and most seasoned independent sales channel for high-performance networking technology. Signing this veteran sales force is another step in Acacia's assault on the $3 billion local area network (LAN (Local Area Network) A communications network that serves users within a confined geographical area. The "clients" are the user's workstations typically running Windows, although Mac and Linux clients are also used. ) switching market. More than 100 salespeople at the 13 manufacturer's representative firms will sell Acacia's stackable, programmable NovaSwitches to an estimated 20,000 end-users, and 100 technical network integrators and value-added resellers (VARs) across North America North America, third largest continent (1990 est. pop. 365,000,000), c.9,400,000 sq mi (24,346,000 sq km), the northern of the two continents of the Western Hemisphere. . Each firm in this channel, which in the past represented industry titan Cisco, as well as Crescendo and Grand Junction, averages up to $5 million in LAN switching
LAN switching is a form of packet switching used in local area networks. Switching technologies are crucial to network design, or to that minority of LANs that are used outside the home. equipment sales per year. The Acacia channel will target the "sweet spot" in this fastest growing segment of the networking market, networks of 100 to 1,000 users in industries such as healthcare/medical, insurance, pre-press and manufacturing. Acacia's NovaSwitches offer networking customers top performance with built-in investment protection and advanced management functions. Bill Moore For other persons named Bill Moore, see Bill Moore (disambiguation). Bill Moore (William L. Moore) is a well-known UFOlogist. Prominent in the 1980s, he has co-authored several books with Charles Berlitz, including The Roswell Incident , president of COL-INS-CO, Acacia's rep firm for the Southeast region, said his firm chose Acacia because it offers unique and powerful differentiators in the fiercely competitive LAN switching market. "We picked Acacia's NovaSwitch to attack this market because it has an unmatched ability to adapt and grow with our customers' networks, giving them terrific return on investment," Moore said. "The NovaSwitch line delivers 10 and 100 megabit per second A megabit per second (abbreviated as Mbit/s, Mbps, or mbps) is a unit of data transfer rate equal to 1,000,000 bits per second. Because there are 8 bits in a byte, a transfer speed of 8 megabits per second (8 Mbps) is equivalent to 1,000,000 bytes switching today and Gigabit Ethernet An Ethernet standard that transmits at 1 Gbps. Used mostly to connect high-end workstations and servers as well as for network backbones, Gigabit Ethernet transmits full duplex from point to point using switches and half duplex in a shared environment (CSMA/CD) using a hub. and ATM when customers are ready. What's more, all of the products can stack together and all of the expansion modules work with every model. And NovaSwitch gives customers something no one else has - a fully programmable switch that can be field upgraded to add new features or comply with standards such as VLAN See virtual LAN. VLAN - Virtual Local Area Network and QoS." NovaSwitch is the first third-generation, Gigabit Ethernet-ready switch on the market delivering full programmability through powerful new digital signal processor A digital signal processor (DSP) is a specialized microprocessor designed specifically for digital signal processing, generally in real-time computing. Characteristics of typical Digital Signal Processors
Meeting customers' needs with advanced management functions Acacia's new channel partners also expect the advanced management functions built into NovaSwitches to attract customers. NovaWeb, an embedded web server Web server software embedded within a hardware device such as a print server. It is widely used in a myriad of devices, because it allows access to the software via any Web browser, typically for configuring the device or obtaining reports. See ETI and Web server. , enables switch management from any location in the world using standard Web browsers The following is a list of web browsers. Historical Historically important browsers In order of release:
E.g. Ethernet can carry 10 Mbps. traffic. "The Acacia team clearly sought and heard the voice of the customer before building the NovaSwitch - and our customers are really taking notice," said Tim Piechel, president of Peripheral Products, Inc., one of Acacia's 13 new representative firms. "It is chock-full of integral management features and the right tools - from a Web manager to RMON - to help them observe, troubleshoot and optimize the performance of their networks. NovaSwitch is the only product we've seen that has such powerful management without compromising switch performance." Acacia has also made a significant investment in training and marketing programs for its new manufacturer's reps, VARs and network integrators. "We were really impressed with how quickly the company kicked off direct mail and valuable promotional programs to spread the word to our customers and give them incentives to try and buy the NovaSwitch products," said Merrill Lykes, president of Uptime Limited, an Oklahoma-based integrator that specializes in delivering high-performance networking solutions. "We were given excellent sales and technical training, as well as support at Networks Expo in Dallas, one of the busiest events of the year in our region." On the road to $200 million goal By signing this new rep and VAR channel for the Acacia branded products in North America, the company completes an important phase of its worldwide strategy of developing "strategically synergistic and minimally overlapping" sales channels. In addition to selling their NovaSwitch products through the rep channel, Acacia will be private labeling products to a select group of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) who sell directly to the Fortune 1,000. The company is currently completing contracts with OEMs in the networking, computing and telecommunications segments worldwide, and with master resellers and integrators in the Far East and Europe. "Our agreement with this seasoned, market-savvy, aggressive rep channel demonstrates that the market understands the importance of this new generation of Fast, Adaptive switches that Acacia has pioneered. When combined with a select group of high-powered OEMs and international agents, we fully expect Acacia to achieve $20 million in sales in 1997, growing rapidly to $200 million by the year 2000," said Acacia President and co-founder Michael Gagnon. About NovaSwitch: third generation switching based on breakthrough technology Acacia's NovaSwitch products are the first to embrace DSP technology to achieve full field programmability and high-bandwidth stacking, making NovaSwitch the first of a third generation of Fast, Adaptive switches. Acacia switches feature the company's SNaP (Switched Network adaptive Processor) ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) Pronounced "a-sick." A chip that is custom designed for a specific application rather than a general-purpose chip such as a microprocessor. (Application Specific Integrated Circuit integrated circuit (IC), electronic circuit built on a semiconductor substrate, usually one of single-crystal silicon. The circuit, often called a chip, is packaged in a hermetically sealed case or a nonhermetic plastic capsule, with leads extending from it for ) chipset, which combines the performance and affordability of ASIC technology with the programmability and power of a new generation of DSPs, enabling NovaSwitches to quickly adapt to new networking standards. Acacia transplanted DSP technology from high-volume consumer applications like cellular phones and video games See video game console. , driving down costs and giving Acacia a significant lead in price/performance value. DSP technology was heralded at the recent Next Generation Networks '96 Conference in Washington, D.C. as a necessary ingredient, along with programmability and wide-bandwidth stacking, for a new breed of advanced LAN switches. The NovaSwitch products deliver on all third-generation criteria, with an unmatched combination of switching and stacking bandwidth - 2.56 gigabits per second internal switching capacity, 3.4 gigabits per second of stacking throughout, and nine gigabits per second aggregate system bandwidth. With tremendous reserve capacity, the Nova Switch designs are ready to support Gigabit Ethernet today. NovaSwitches can be stacked up to seven units for up to 280 switched Ethernet ports and up to 40, 100Mbps high-speed uplinks, allowing customers to build small workgroups and expand to support thousands of users and server connections. This building block method of growing a network provides all of the features and performance of enterprise-level chassis platforms for significantly less expense. About Acacia Networks Acacia Networks was founded in January 1995 to apply a powerful new generation of programmable silicon, transplanted from high-volume commercial and consumer applications, to the LAN switching market. Acacia's NovaSwitches offer breakthrough price/performance to networking customers. The privately held company privately held company A firm whose shares are held within a relatively small circle of owners and are not traded publicly. is headquartered in Lowell, Mass., and has more than 50 engineers and scientists developing high-speed LAN products and technology. For more information see Acacia's Web site at http://www.acacianet.com. -0- Acacia Networks, NovaSwitch, NovaLink, GigaPlane, GigaLink, Stackplane, NovaView, NovaWeb, mini-NOC, SNaP ASIC, Fast, Adaptive Switching and Megabits to Gigabits are trademarks of Acacia Networks Inc. Other products and company names are trademarks of their respective holders. CONTACT: Alan Raderman Acacia Networks (508) 275-0606 araderman@acacianet.com or Glen Zimmerman Beaupre & Co. Public Relations public relations, activities and policies used to create public interest in a person, idea, product, institution, or business establishment. By its nature, public relations is devoted to serving particular interests by presenting them to the public in the most (603) 436-6690 gzimmer@beaupre.com |
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