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Cloud Focus For Alcatel-Lucent Upgrades: Page 2 of 2

“This scenario applies very well in education where we have a lot of shared workstations,” Grossner says. “If a faculty member logs on, we give them certain access rights, and if a student logs into the same workstation, we want to be able to apply a different set of access rights.”

Also new to the platform is a set of tools to measure the QoS to a particular user on a particular device running a particular applications, he says.

The Application Fluency network is designed to support network connections using the session initiation protocol (SIP), but later, the platform will be able to support virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and the HTTP standard for Web-delivered applications, says Grossner.

Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise is a unit of the Paris-based parent company Alcatel-Lucent. While the company has struggled against such competitors as Cisco Systems in the North American market -- “a sore point” for Alcatel-Lucent, says Grossner -- its sales grew by 20.5% in the region in the fourth quarter of 2011, and by nearly 11% in all of 2011, compared to the same periods of 2010.

Cisco's domination of the networking technology space continues, despite the inroads of competitors like Alcatel-Lucent, but a host of vendors – including HP and Dell – are nipping at its heels. An InformationWeek Analytics report finds it will have to work harder to keep it that way.

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