Colin C. Haley

While Nortel was busy grabbing headlines with its outsourcing deal this morning, Cisco went ahead and made some of its own news today. The network equipment giant will pay $82 million in cash for the 83 percent of Actona Technologies that it doesn’t already own. Privately held Actona makes wide area network file services software […]

UPDATED After six months of non-stop negotiations, Nortel has reached an agreement to sell its remaining optical, wireless and enterprise production facilities to Flextronics . Nortel pursued the deal to cut costs and become more responsive to the turbulent network equipment market. Nortel will receive between $675 million and $725 million in staggered cash payments […]

Covad and BellSouth are both claiming victory after the latest ruling in their 4-year-old antitrust battle. On Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit said the competitive communications company could pursue “several (but not all)” of its antitrust claims against the Baby Bell. The original lawsuit, which was dismissed in a district […]

Network equipment maker Juniper has integrated an industry security standard with its network access appliances in order to help customers safeguard systems. The company’s NetScreen Secure Access SSL VPN products now work with the Security Assertion Markup Language , a specification for sharing authorization data between different security systems. SAML (pronounced “sam-el”) incorporates XML and […]

IBM is expanding its partner program to help independent software vendors (ISVs) build applications for the public sector and the insurance industry. “These two industries are great for ISVs,” said Scott Hebner, vice president of marketing and strategy. “In government and insurance, the needs become very localized.” For example, Massachusetts tax law is different from […]

Like diplomats representing historical adversaries, the CEOs of rival network equipment giants Cisco Systems and Nortel Networks have been gingerly floating a rapprochement. Using the media as intermediary, Cisco’s John Chambers said he’d “love” a partnership, to which Nortel’s Bill Owens responded that he’s “open” to the idea. The two men later met after a […]

After a long lull, there’s been a lot of action in the core router market lately. With heavy movement under way by the likes of Cisco, Axiowave and Juniper, electronics giant Hitachi and computer and network systems specialist NEC Corp. dialed in to opportunities out east to spice up the game. Cisco released its much-anticipated […]

Officials arrested an America Online (AOL) employee for allegedly stealing millions of members’ screen names, which were later sold to spammers,” law enforcement officials and the ISP said Wednesday. Jason Smathers was picked up at his home in Harpers Ferry, W. Va., this morning. The 24-year-old AOL computer engineer allegedly pilfered the screen names last […]

Citing a major change in federal regulatory policy, AT&T will stop pursuing new local and long-distance residential customers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, Ohio, Tennessee and Washington. “The customer acquisition costs are very high in those states,” AT&T spokesman Bob Nersesian told internetnews.com. AT&T is assessing whether to continue marketing for new subscribers in […]

AT&T , which is pushing its managed network services to overcome fading long-distance phone business, has landed the Internal Revenue Service as a customer. The five-year deal flows through AT&T’s Government Solutions division, based in Vienna, Va., and could be worth more than $54 million. Losing bidders were not disclosed. Under the terms, the telecom […]

Nortel and Texas Instruments are teaming to improve the interoperability of Voice over Internet Protocol equipment, the companies announced at the Supercomm trade show in Chicago today. The network gear maker and chip and software giant hope to increase the adoption of services based on Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), a signaling protocol for Internet conferencing, […]

Networking players took off at Supercomm today, wasting no time in the windy city announcing a slew of new products, services, partnerships and customers. According to Christin Armacost, an analyst at SG Cowen & Co., in a research note this morning, the trade show should “provide a more positive tone on the telco equipment industry […]