Cisco announced that BT Global Services intends to deploy the new Cisco ASR1000 Series Aggregation Services Routers. BT Global Services has been involved in testing the Cisco ASR 1000 Series Routers prior to the product's launch in March this year.

"One of our key challenges is to quickly roll out new services with the same time managing the operational complexity of delivering those services," said David Stark, vice president, CPE and Converged Services, BT Global Services.

"Unlike past generation routers, which are dependant on specific service blades, the Cisco ASR 1000 supports multiple services such as high-speed firewall, security and flexible packet matching on the platform in hardware. There is no need for engineering site visits to install service blades and services can be turned on instantly with minimal network downtime," Stark added.

The Cisco ASR 1000 Series Routers are driven by the new Cisco QuantumFlow Processor (QFP), the industry's first fully-integrated and programmable processing engine. The ASR 1000 Series features software virtualization to enable 'instant-on' provisioning and the simultaneous use of a wide range of service functionality, including firewall, IP security virtual private networks (IPsec VPNs),deep-packet inspection (DPI) and Session Border Control (SBC). Such broad-ranging embedded capabilities eliminate the need to deploy multiple single-function appliances in addition to a router, offering dramatic savings in capital costs and operations expenses and a reduction in users' carbon footprints.

Such capabilities also allow BT Global Services to more quickly respond to their customers changing needs, as new services can be activated remotely instead of requiring a truck roll and service call.

"The Cisco ASR1000 Series offers the quality of service and high-availability functions needed for us to provide service quality guarantees to our customers," said Stark. "BT Global Services has been engaged in ASR testing early in the product lifecycle, and we are satisfied with the test results so far and by the potential of the ASR1000 for delivering next-generation services. We look forward to deploying the ASR1000 range of routers in our major finance and enterprise markets for critical managed service applications such as highly secure encryption and VPN, as well as Cisco TelePresence. We believe this represents an opportunity for BT Global Services to deliver features and functionality to our customers in an efficient and cost effective manner."

"We believe that BT Global Services' world-class management capabilities, combined with the price-performance and power efficiency offered by the ASR 1000 Series make an attractive proposition," said Stefan Dyckerhoff, vice president and general manager of the Cisco Aggregation Routing business unit. "Enterprise and financial customers of BT Global Services can look forward to a range of new services that will help them meet the challenges of a rapidly-changing and environmentally-aware world."