By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor

MegaPath (News - Alert), a provider of managed data, voice, and security services in North America, announced that it was ranked as Top Provider among Market Challenger's in the Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) Services category of Nemertes Research’s 2011 PilotHouse Awards.

Nemertes Research’s PilotHouse awards recognize companies for their outstanding technological innovation, superior performance, customer service and value. It reflects IT decision makers’ first-hand experience with products and services, according to MegaPath officials.

The awards were decided based on a survey conducted on more than 2,000 IT decision makers who rated their providers on a one-to-five scale on value, technology and customer service. Vendors across 22 categories were broken into two segments: Market Leaders, a small group of vendors that comprise a large percent of the market, and Market Challengers, a larger group of vendors that together comprise a smaller percentage of the overall market.

Also this week, TMC’s (News - Alert) Carolyn J. Dawson wrote about new In-Stat (News - Alert) research finding that MPLS communication technology spending will hit the $2.4 billion mark in 2015.

Wireline data services, categorized as business spending, includes expenditures incurred by the business on wide area network (WAN) data transport services. In addition to including cable, DSL, network-based IP VPN, T1, frame relay, ATM, and Ethernet services, Wireline data services also includes MPLS (multiprotocol label switching). MPLS utilized in high-performance telecommunications networks, employs labels to help direct and deliver data from one network node to the other and enables the creation of “virtual links” between distant nodes.

Greg Potter, In-Stat analyst said that, “MPLS is protocol agnostic and highly scalable. It was designed to provide a unified data-carrying service for both circuit-based clients and packet-switching clients. A number of different technologies were previously deployed with similar goals; like frame relay and ATM. Newly collected data tells us that the increase in MPLS spending has had a negative impact on some of these other technologies.”

And this week TMC’s Shamila Janakiraman wrote that Zerto announced the launch of a business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) technology that can serve the needs of virtualized data centers and cloud environments.

The announcement proclaimed the commercial availability of “Zerto Virtual Replication,” a hypervisor-based replication tool for large enterprises. The company has also completed a $15 million Series B funding round led by U.S. Venture Partners alongside existing investors Battery Ventures and Greylock Partners.

Jacques Benkoski, Venture Partner at USVP said, “With many companies seeking to move their critical applications to virtualized and cloud-based environments, the lack of adequate BC/DR solutions has been a major impediment. We are pleased to be able to invest in an experienced team and a solution that enables the next major wave of virtualization and cloud adoption by Fortune 500 companies.”

According to officials, the Zerto Virtual Replication is a hypervisor-based product that allows replication to occur within the virtual infrastructure of the data center and not to the physical storage arrays.

And this week Raju Shanbhag wrote that Orckit-Corrigent announced that the company’s CM-401x PTN access product line has won the prestigious Golden Bridge Awards titles.

As packet transport tool, Ethernet, IP/IPMPLS and MPLS-TP technologies are implemented in the CM-401x portfolio, as well as standard and interoperable packet synchronization and circuit emulation technologies.

Awarded for best Access Innovation in Information Technology, Orckit-Corrigent’s CM-401x product line includes the CM-4011, CM-4012, and CM-4013 PTN access switches. The products offer wholesome access for legacy SDH and PDH migration, mobile backhaul, and enterprise CLE and pre-aggregation applications.

The CM-401x portfolio offers a mixture of Ethernet, PDH and SDH interfaces, dual stack IP/MPLS and MPLS-TP, circuit emulation technologies and packet synchronization.

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