NEC Named One of the 50 Most Innovative Companies

It is with great pride that I can announce NEC was chosen as one of the 50 Most Innovative Companies, according to a recent Boston Consulting Group innovation survey. With thousands of senior level executives participating in this study, our commitment to improving the way people live, work, and communicate is gaining recognition from accolades such as this, which is a testament to the dedication of our organization.

A key component of this award was tied to research and development, an area NEC has always prioritized, leading to technology and solutions that have a positive impact on both business and society. With more than 65,000+ patents, pioneering IT, communications and biometrics technologies, NEC technology innovation has provided a solid foundation for this prestigious recognition.

Some of NEC’s more recent innovations:

NEC Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Smart City platforms
• Video analytics that can analyze millions of images in seconds
• Predictive analytics that calculates the landslide risk of hillsides
Automated Urban Surveillance and Smart Transportation solutions
• Smart City disaster response solutions
• Biometric health screening technology
Behavior analytics for crowd and event management

These important innovations improve the safety, security and operational efficiency required of today’s society, and when I look at our recent achievements, I know that we are making a difference.

Watch our 50th anniversary in North America video to learn more about our long history of innovation .

NEC awarded first Annual Software-Defined Networking Innovation Award from Search Networking

NEC was honored to accept today the Network Innovation Award  from Search Networking.com, the first award ever given to a networking company for its work in the rapidly emerging Software-Defined Networking (SDN) arena.  In annoucing the award, Executive Editor Rivka Little commented“In the past year, many companies have begun to firm up their SDN plans, but one company made the quickest strides in getting innovative OpenFlow products to market – NEC Corporation of America.  So it is fitting that NEC is the first company to win a SearchNetworking.com Network Innovation Award in the category of Software-Defined Networking.”

Jeremy Hurley presenting award to Don ClarkJeremy Hurley, SearchNetworking.com Publisher, is shown here (left) presenting the Innovation honor to Don Clark, Director of Business Development for  the ProgrammableFlow® Open SDN product suite.  More than 400 engineering person years have been invested by NEC into this ground-breaking Software-Defined Networking solution, a commitment first begun in 2008 when NEC co-founded and helped fund The Clean Slate Lab at Stanford, the birthplace of the OpenFlow protocol.  First to market with a complete programmable networking solution in May of 2011, NEC currently offers a third version of its award-winning OpenFlow-based PF6800 controller.  In addition to the simplified and automated network originally introduced in 2011, Version 3 introduced end-to-end Quality of Service, scalability beyond  4,096 VLANs, advanced network automation and granular network management.  And just last week NEC participated with 20 other vendors at PlugFest, testing and demonstrating interoperability with multiple vendors including Broadcom, Brocade, Extreme, IBM and Juniper.

NEC openflow Networking Innovation AwardSDN marks a major change in the network landscape by moving the intelligence off proprietary routers and switches and into a centralized controller, where software enables you to design, deploy, monitor and manage the network from a single point.   The OpenFlow-based ProgrammableFlow network suite separates the control plane from the data plane, enabling this radical simplification and complete network-wide virtuallization.  Equally important, the  ProgrammableFlow Network Fabric delivers an open, standardized northbound API to enable applications to be readily added to the network and speeding service delivery and business agility.  These qualities were some of the benefits SearchNetworking editors saw in ProgrammableFlow Open SDN when they gave us the Networking Innovation Award.  We are proud to accept this honor.    To learn more about NEC’s ProgrammableFlow solution visit:  http://necam.com/pflow