23 March 2015
Witness the dot-com boom and bust: a heady time toward the end of the millennium when venture capital funds flowed quickly into internet firms, company valuations were sometimes based on little more than web hits, launch parties boasted A-list celebs, and expectations (not to mention stock prices) were often unreasonably high. We know how that story ended, of course. Even as the champagne was uncorked, bubbles were burst, bankrolls were spent, and many companies failed—a cautionary time that's cast a long shadow ever since.
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By OFC | Posted: 22 March 2015
We're glad you're here. Each morning of the conference, we'll be sending a daily wrap message — spotlighting things to note for the day ahead and highlights from the day before. Today, we focus on several ways to access Digest Papers from the technical conference.
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By Steve Alexander, Senior VP and CTO at Ciena | Posted: 19 March 2015
Steve Alexander, Senior VP and CTO at Ciena, talks about how networks must continue to evolve to meet the needs of today's on-demand world.
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By Stu Benington, Vice President of Cloud and SDN Business Unit, Coriant | Posted: 19 March 2015
Stu Benington, Vice President of Cloud and SDN Business Unit, Coriant discusses how mobile operators can use Software Defined Networking (SDN) to boost their own networks to become more competitive.
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By Casimer DeCusatis, Ph.D. | Posted: 26 February 2015
Although we seldom think about it, optical networks are a vital part of the economic infrastructure in many parts of the world. Emerging global economies are increasingly reliant on the Internet to promote economic development and address social issues. More established nations are increasingly leveraging cloud computing and the Internet for critical missions involving national security, public health and safety, and financial risk. The United States Central Intelligence Agency, for example, was recognized recently for their efforts in moving critical workloads into the cloud, and in 2013 the President issued executive order 13636, “Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity”.
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By Casimer DeCusatis, Ph.D. | Posted: 4 November 2014
The optical networking community seems to be embracing open source software in a big way. While industry leading conferences like OFC have always been strong advocates for interoperability and a standards-based approach to networking, this has traditionally been a hardware-focused community.
Given the increasing importance of software in network control planes, data centers, and telecommunication systems, it’s not surprising that OFC will also include a greater emphasis on open source code. This means a faster development cycle compared with the underlying hardware, and more opportunities for innovation as the source code for network control planes becomes accessible to the global programming community.
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By Casimer DeCusatis | Posted: 26 September 2014
Some funny things happened while the Internet was minding its own business and incessantly growing into every corner of our lives. Not that we didn’t see it coming. When I was giving presentations at optics conferences in the late 1990s, I recall a quote from a major industry trade magazine predicting that the data center of the future would be “software and a network”. As the Internet of Things (IoT) begins to take shape, this prediction is coming true in ways that nobody ever imagined. And optical networking is positioned to play a major role in the IoT.
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By Casimer DeCusatis | Posted: 22 July 2014
Despite all the advances in telepresence, video distribution, and webinars, technical conferences remain one of the fundamental ways that our profession shares information. In fact, the value of a face-to-face conference has become even more apparent in this age of virtual, always-on communication.
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By Casimer DeCusatis | Posted: 25 June 2014
Is it possible to think of something without knowing a word to describe it ? According to some studies, humans understand the concept of numbers and counting before knowing the words for those numbers. Perhaps that means that this month’s blog will be easier for everyone to understand, since I’ve found that it’s hard to describe the emerging market for 40 – 100 Gbit/s optical links without using an awful lot of numbers (I needed to use 65 numbers in this post alone, including that last one).
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