Reliant FORM 10-K manual Product development, Data networking and security solutions

Data networking and security solutions

We offer a broad range of data networking (packet switching and routing) and security solutions for our enterprise customers. Our packet switching and routing systems include data switching systems, aggregation products, virtual private network gateways and routers, including:

•Our data switches, secure routers and associated security products provide data switching designed to allow our customers to provide Internet data security and IP services including IP routing, virtual private networks, deep packet inspection, firewall applications, policy management and data traffic flow management. These products also enable our customers to manage and prioritize the Internet content that is provided to end-users and balance the amount of communications traffic on multiple Internet servers.

•Our Ethernet switch portfolio is a series of high performance packet switches for our enterprise customers’ small to large local area networks that use the Ethernet, a standard computer networking protocol for local area networks.

•Our multi-protocol routers offer high-speed, high-capacity and medium-capacity data switching to support a wide range of data communications technologies, including multi-protocol label switching, asynchronous transfer mode, IP and frame relay services. Our Ethernet routing switches deliver IP routing and switching.

•Our portfolio of WLAN service switching products is designed to provide secure and efficient transmission of WLAN data and voice traffic for mobile users. Our WLAN voice products integrate with our communications servers and gateway products to provide a wireless voice over IP solution for our customers.

•Our portfolio of optical network switching products is designed to extend the range of storage area networks to enable our customers to consolidate their data servers. Our products enable enterprises to deploy these storage area networks in alternate locations, providing geographic redundancy as part of their business continuity strategy.

Product development

We are currently focused on developing products that support the continuing evolution of voice and data communications systems toward converged or combined data, voice and multimedia networks, including:

•The continued development of our multimedia communication server for enterprise, a product that provides the capability to deliver converged data, voice and multimedia applications and enhanced networking capabilities.

•Additions to the applications in our communications server products to allow integration of voice over IP, voice extensible markup language, new operating systems and servers, and voice recognition speech products.

•New developments in data networking products that will deliver resiliency, enable increased data network traffic and provide suitable service levels and network connectivity and power to devices over the same line.

•The development of the next generation web platform, which will feature higher performance, scalability (that is, the ability to grow a service or capability with incremental cost) and integrated applications.

•Enhancements to our security portfolio including the new secure sockets layer, or SSL, and switching products and a new high-end secure router product. In addition, we have entered into and continue to pursue strategic relationships that enhance our end-to-end security solutions.

•Updates to our customer premises-based telephone systems to support our software that enables those systems to function entirely as a packet-based system or as a hybrid packet and circuit switching system.

Markets

We offer Enterprise Networks products to enterprises around the world. With the growth of data, voice and multimedia communications over the public telephone network, the public Internet and private voice and data communications networks, there is an increasing opportunity to converge disparate networks towards a single, high performance network that can support various types of communications traffic and applications.

We believe that in order to meet the growing demand for increased capacity at lower per-minute rates, enterprises will transition their circuit- based voice communications to more cost effective packet-based technologies. As a result, we anticipate growth in demand for packet-based networking equipment that supports the convergence of data, voice and multimedia communications over a single communications network and that provides greater network capacity, reliability, speed, quality and performance. However, the rate of growth of this progression is unclear.

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