Huge Business Impact – SASER Closing Event in Stuttgart
Stuttgart. After three years of successful work, Celtic-Plus Flagship Project SASER proudly presented its achievement at a closing event in Stuttgart, Germany. More than 80 participants attended the event, which was hosted at the premises of Alcatel-Lucent, the project leader of SASER.
SASER, which stands for “Safe and Secure European Routing”, achieved a plethora of results that have contributed to making communications networks in Europe faster, more cost-effective, safer and more secure. The national funding bodies which contributed to finance SASER showed themselves highly satisfied with the return for their R&D investment.
Dr. Christine Thomas, Director Innovation for Society at the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF), acknowledged how much technological and economic impact was achieved by the project in just three years, and stressed that no individual country can achieve such crucial impacts on global telecommunications on its own. Dr. Loïc Duflot, Head of Networks and Digital Use Division at French public funding organisation DGE, highlighted important results realised by the French participants in SASER that fit very well with the objectives of the French R&D strategy. The upcoming Industry 4.0, for example, strongly relies on reliable secure communication services. Tiina Nurmi from Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation, chimed in, saying that the major topic in Finland’s ICT strategy is currently cybersecurity, and SASER has been addressing exactly that. Many of the latest developments regarding Smart Cities, digital mobility services, etc. would not have been possible without cyber security.
Celtic-Plus Chairman Jacques Magen thanked the project consortium for its excellent work and the public authorities from the countries that funded SASER for their support. At the same time he expressed the hope that some of the countries participating in Celtic-Plus who have not been very active recently would be motivated by the success of SASER to increase their contribution to also enable companies in their countries to benefit from Celtic-Plus projects.
In the second part of the event, SASER consortium partners presented the achievements and business impacts from the four sub-projects of SASER. SASER-SaveNet was presented by Dr. Andreas Leven from Alcatel-Lucent as well as Dr. Christian Simonneau (also Alcatel-Lucent) and Dr. Jean-François Morizur, CEO of CaiLabs. SASER-Siegfried was presented by Josef Urban from Nokia, Dr. Marc Bohn from Coriant, and Mika Holmberg form Finnish SME 2NS. Dr. Jörg-Peter Elbers from ADVA Optical Networking presented SASER-ADVAntage-NET, and finally, Andreas Umbach from Finisar Germany explained SASER Horizontal.
The common theme among all presentations was the huge business impact that SASER already achieved during the lifetime of the project. Dozens of new products and product improvements, as well as many standards contributions, not to speak of the numerous published papers, are proof that SASER has been a huge step for better and more secure communications in Europe and a push for European industry in related ICT sectors. Projects like SASER are crucial for Europe’s companies, because they ensure that technology invented and made in Europe stays at the competitive edge necessary to be successful in the global market of cutting edge technical products.
About SASER
The Internet has become an indispensable part of the infrastructure for most of the aspects of daily life and has developed to a fundamental infrastructure for Europe. The uninterrupted, reliable and secure access to the Internet is seen as a basic right for all citizens and a significant economical factor. The current infrastructure lacks many of those features which are obviously associated with a trusted, safe and secure communication medium. The number of attacks on Internet-connected systems are growing and the attacks have become more serious and more technically complex than in the past.
The SASER project has provided the scientific, technical, and technological concepts and solutions for secure transport networks in the 2020 time frame.
A European solution envisaged by SASER is based on the strengths and expertise in security and high-speed optical transport networks to overcome the bottlenecks and vulnerabilities of today’s electronic all-IP based infrastructure. The SASER consortium combines leading equipment providers, network operators, universities and research institutions and offers the prerequisites for a successful development, implementation and standardisation of the proposed solutions.
Further information about SASER is available at http://projects.celticplus.eu/saser/
