Renewed regional growth in sales of networking equipment has driven Foundry Networks to push its innovative and cost-effective range of solutions in the Middle East - something the vendor will continue to do at GITEX TECHNOLOGY WEEK.

"We noticed a rebirth of spending in the networking market last year with enterprises upgrading antiquated networking equipment in favour of Gigabit PoE (Power over Ethernet) switches, with 10Gbit capabilities for investment protection. IT spending in the Middle East alone is expected to grow 50% by 2010 making this an excellent time for Foundry," comments Ben Taft, the firm's VP of marketing.

This major growth spurt in the region has led the vendor to offer some of its critical product ranges at this year's GULFCOMMS event, according to Foundry's regional manager for the Middle East and North Africa, Farook Majeed. This will include core and backbone switches, edge products with PoE and wireless security, which will all be at Foundry's booth.

"We will have our newest and most advanced switching solutions from our recently announced BigIron RX-32, an energy efficient routing switch optimised to address growing capacity and performance needs within the datacentre, high-performance computing (HPC) and Internet Exchange Points (IXP)," says Majeed on the vendor's specific plans.

"We will also feature our FastIron LS Series of compact 10/100/1000 Mbits Ethernet edge switches," Majeed continues.