Thales e-Security Inc. is a subsidiary of the group formerly known as Thomson-CSF. Thales is one of the world’s leading international electronics and systems groups addressing defence, aerospace and security markets worldwide. The multinational Group’s e-security business has a strong customer base in the banking sector which benefits from a host of in-house developed Thales security models. The company also is very much present in the government sector, said Juan C. Asenjo, Global e-Security Product Manager for the Group. “The e-Security activities of Thales supply governments such as the US, UK, France and Norway with encryption technology for the secure exchange of information.” We spoke with Mr. Asenjo about how Thales’s e-security business has evolved over the past eight years, and more specifically about their partnership with Alcatel-Lucent. Thales e-Security Inc. is a subsidiary of the group formerly known as Thomson-CSF. Thales is one of the world’s leading international electronics and systems groups addressing defence, aerospace and security markets worldwide. The multinational Group’s e-security business has a strong customer base in the banking sector which benefits from a host of in-house developed Thales security models. The company also is very much present in the government sector, said Juan C. Asenjo, Global e-Security Product Manager for the Group. “The e-Security activities of Thales supply governments such as the US, UK, France and Norway with encryption technology for the secure exchange of information.” We spoke with Mr. Asenjo about how Thales’s e-security business has evolved over the past eight years, and more specifically about their partnership with Alcatel-Lucent. One of the jewels in France's industrial crown, Thales began its operations in 1893 as the Compagnie Française Thomson-Houston. This company was formed to export the patents and processes developed by the Thomson-Houston International Corporation, itself founded in Connecticut in the United States by Edwin Houston and Elihu Thomson in 1879. The French company initially served as a sales and marketing arm for its US parent, which focused especially on the development of tramways and other types of electrical infrastructure systems. Another prominent French company that played a prominent role in Thomson-Houston's later history, the Compagnie Générale de Télégraphie Sans Fil (CSF—literally, the ‘wireless telegraph company’) was established in 1918. CSF merged with Thomson in 1968. The appointment of Denis Ranque as the company’s CEO and chairman in 1998 marked the start of a new era for the company. In 1999, the now independent and publicly listed Thomson-CSF went on a buying spree, enhancing its multi-domestic policy by acquiring 50% of ADI of Australia, ADS of South Africa, Sextant-in-Flight Systems of the United States, and Avimo, an optronics company with operations in Singapore and the United Kingdom. The year 2000 marked a turning point for the company. In that year the company acquired Racal Electronics of the United Kingdom, giving it the number two position in that country's defence and aerospace electronics market. The acquisition prompted the company to adopt a new name, Thales, after the Greek philosopher and mathematician, at the end of the year. At that time, the company announced its formation of Thales Raytheon Systems, a joint venture with the US-based Raytheon, to develop air defence systems, which began operations in 2001. At the same time, the French government announced its intention to reduce its holding in the company to below the 33 percent mark, meaning it would no longer have a minority block on company decisions. As it entered the new century, Thales emerged as one of the world’s top three defence and aerospace electronics systems companies and expected to remain a force to be reckoned with on a global scale. Mr. Asenjo, who joined Thales eight years ago, added that part of Thales’ current e-security business was built on Racal’s intellectual property in electronics payment security: “We’ve built on their heritage in this field.” At the time of the acquisition, Racal was one of the UK’s biggest electronics companies and indeed one of the most famous names in UK industry overall. Its shrewdest move may have been the creation of mobile phone group Vodafone, which was spun off into a separate entity and is now one of Europe’s largest telcos. Thales, then still operating under the Thomson-CSF name, bought Racal for GBP 1.3 billion with the aim to strengthen its position in the UK and Europe; the deal notably roughly doubled the size of Thomson-CSF’s operations in the UK. The move gave the French group control of a raft of businesses from radar and sonar, to internet services, as well as Racal’s 22% stake in the UK’s National Lottery operator Camelot. The acquisition of Racal’s electronics payment security business additionally prompted Thales to establish a single business line dedicated to electronic transactions for international markets, comprising several companies with established positions in this field in Europe, the US and Latin America. Mr. Asenjo again emphasised that the Thales e-Security offering was created to leverage Racal’s leadership in cryptographic security products and electronic payment, specifically, to provide network security solutions for government and the private sector. Racal’s expertise was initially married to that of Dassault subsidiary DAT, acquired by the group in 1998 and specialising in smart card payment terminals and ticketing, as well as secure identity cards. Inheriting Racal’s strong presence in the credit card sector, the newly formed Thales e-Security business thus combined competences in network security, data management, and smart card operations. With operations in 50 countries and 68,000 employees, Thales today is a world leader in information systems for the Aerospace, Defence and Security markets. In 2007, the Group completed a large-scale reconfiguration of its business portfolio with the finalisation of the major strategic operations initiated the previous year. These included the acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent’s transportation and security businesses and space businesses. Thales, acquisition of part of Alcatel-Lucent’s business has cemented cooperation between the two multi-billion Euro companies overall. The two have notably announced that they have successfully completed interoperability between the Alcatel-Lucent 1850 Transport Service Switch (TSS) and Thales, Datacryptors ™. This interoperability test addressed large enterprise and government demands for highly secure networks to protect mission-critical data for sensitive information and public safety applications. Alcatel-Lucent and Thales take a new step in protecting mission-critical data distributed over optical fiber networks. The joint achievement further reinforces the cooperation between Alcatel-Lucent and Thales in strategic domains such as network security. Thales added in a press statement that it believes that global security concerns, coupled with new regulations in the Asia, Europe and the US, are changing the security requirements in the wide area network (WAN) environment. As packet traffic increases, large enterprises and governments need to handle a wider variety of traffic streams. The interoperability test that Alcatel-Lucent and Thales performed demonstrated that SONET/SDH networks operating up to 10Gbit/s, as well as 1 and 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks can be secured without impacting the traffic. This allows for voice, video and data services to be securely transported with negligible latency. Thales synchronous optical network/synchronous digital hierarchy (SONET/SDH) and Gigabit Ethernet Datacryptors successfully demonstrated encryption of an aggregate packet signal generated by the Alcatel-Lucent 1850 TSS. Alcatel-Lucent has been deploying mission-critical WAN solutions for government, enterprises, and service provider networks for decades. The Alcatel-Lucent 1850 TSS enables service providers to migrate from time-division multiplexing (TDM) to packet-based transport with flexible provisioning of carrier Ethernet transport multi-protocol label switching (T-MPLS), SONET/SDH, wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) and optical transport hierarchy (OTH) services in any proportion, with only a simple change of the line cards. This capability ensures that service providers can support current and future traffic requirements by eliminating scalability issues encountered by traditional multi-service provisioning platform/multi-service transport platform (MSPP/MSTP) solutions as packet-based traffic grows. Governments and enterprises have in turn deployed Thales’s Datacryptor product line for many years in their new SONET/SDH and Gigabit Ethernet networks. Thales’s Layer 2 encryption technologies provide superior throughput and lower latency than IPSec-based Layer 3 solutions. Layer 3 (IPSec) adds additional overhead that can create performance issues for high bandwidth applications. Governments and enterprises that need to secure a point-to-point link for connectivity or disaster recovery applications are achieving better performance by shifting from traditional IPSec to Layer 2 encryption solutions by Thales. Alcatel-Lucent and Thales had already demonstrated the ability to secure a specific Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) stream. This new achievement further strengthens the cooperation between Alcatel-Lucent and Thales to deliver safeguarded optical networks that offer high-performance, high-bandwidth capacity and resiliency to keep large enterprises and public institutions running around the clock. “We see further opportunities for continued growth in this field,” commented Mr. Asenjo. “With the constant increase in the volume of information in both the government and the private sector, the volumes of data that need to be processed every day over high-speed networks is growing exponentially. At the same time, especially in business sectors that deal with mission-critical data, ensuring the security of data transfer remains of the essence. Banks process transactions that require the utmost integrity and confidentiality. While we’re becoming an increasingly networked society, we need to ensure not only the availability of data but also the trustworthiness of said data, and that’s precisely where Thales comes in.” Mr. Asenjo added that part of Thales e-Security’s strategy for growth is to focus on developing partnerships, with system integrators and equipment providers. “This creates another route to market for us.” Overall, Mr. Asenjo is very optimistic on Thales’s future in e-security. “We are very aggressive in pursuing the market. It is an area that will continue to grow, as there is a need for the transfer of ever increasing volumes of information and our technology is needed for this secure data exchange.” top - home