Friday Bytes 5/18: Earthlink, Optimum Lightpath, Cbeyond, SSE

A quick look at a few more interesting items from competitive service providers to finish off the week:

As part of its transformation into a cloud player, Earthlink (NASDAQ:ELNK, news, filings) brought in some outside talent yesterday that it poached from none other than XO. Michael Toplisek is now their EVP of IT Services, and will oversee product development, management, and marketing.  The PR refers to Toplisek’s last position as President of Concentric Cloud Solutions, but XO had just recently relaunched that brand. And I do mean ‘just’ – it was unveiled only a little over two weeks ago.  Toplisek had been XO’s Chief Marketing Officer for about three years prior to that after coming over from Global Crossing as part of a mass migration that roiled the waters for both companies at the time. XO’s executive team has had some turnover lately, lending credence to the possibility that Icahn may be preparing a sale.

The New York metro area’s Optimum Lightpath has further tuned its pitch to the healthcare vertical with a new ‘Healthcare Services Suite’. Networks and data management are emerging as a giant challenge both for telecom and medicine, with telemedicine, backoffice management, e-learning, and patient records all going cloud in one form or another. Optimum Lightpath’s package includes Ethernet & transport, interactive entertainment and information via bedside television, hosted voice, conferencing, and video transport.

cbey picked up a contract for its cloud and network solutions with Pro Access Systems, a provider of perimeter security services. Cbeyond will provide Pro Access Systems with a package of voice, data, and cloud services across their eight US offices. Cbeyond has been furiously following a two-pronged strategy of building out cloud services and migrating its customer base to fiber/ethernet connectivity, and this is the sort of contract they want lots more of.

And over in the UK, SSE Telcoms has become the latest member of the 100G club.  They’re using gear from ciena to connect key data centers across the country. I’ve run into SSE Telcoms before, which derives from Scottish and Southern Energy. But for some reason, I hadn’t added them to my European Network Maps page – an oversight I have now corrected, and a large one considering the extent of their fiber footprint.

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Categories: Cloud Computing · Metro fiber · Telecom Equipment