Alcatel announced plans to acquire TiMetra, a start-up based in Mountain View, California, for its forthcoming line of IP/MPLS edge routers. Alcatel agreed to pay approximately US$150 million in Alcatel American Depositary Shares and Alcatel shares for the total capital of TiMetra. The companies said that in order to move beyond the "best-effort" Internet to new, billable services, carriers require IP/MPLS capable of delivering SLA-based virtual private networks (VPNs) and virtual private LANs (VPLS). The TiMetra platform, which has not yet been publicly announced, would be positioned at the network edge, providing deep packet classification and supporting a much richer feature set than current generation routers. TiMetra has been active in the IETF in the development of Virtual Private LAN Services (VPLS), which provide bridged, multi-point WAN connectivity for corporate networks. TiMetra plans to unveil its platform shortly. The TiMetra platform is complementary to the existing Alcatel 7770 Optical Broadband Exchange (OBX), an IP router for the core of service provider networks. Alcatel expects the acquisition to close in Q3.
http://www.alcatel.com
http://www.timetra.com
- TiMetra was founded in April 2002 and received funding from Redpoint Ventures and Accel Partners.
- TiMetra is headed by Basil Alwan. Prior to founding TiMetra, Alwan was VP & GM of Nortel Networks Enterprise Products Division (EPD), a team of 300 developers and staff primarily focused on scalable Layer 3 switched networks. He joined Nortel through the Bay Networks acquisition of Rapid City Communications, where he was VP of Product Management and Marketing.
- In November 2002, Alcatel introduced the second generation of its terabit-scalable, core IP/MPLS backbone router. The Alcatel 7770 Optical Broadband Exchange (OBX), which replaces the existing 7770 Routing Core Platform (RCP), features an ASIC-driven distributed switching fabric and scales from 100 Gbps to 1.9 Tbps of line card capacity. The 7770 OBX features the Alcatel Carrier Environment Internet Systems (ACEIS) to address both the high-cost of current core routing deployments as well as reliability concerns with exiting routers. The control plane, forwarding plane and management plane are completely separate. ACESIS provides “non-stop�? routing software for BGP-4, OSPF and IS-IS. Alcatel supports in-service software upgrades and selective re-starts. The new 7770 OBX features a standard, half-height rack mountable chassis, compared to a proprietary form factor in the prior system. Various expansion line-card shelves can be located up to 100 meters away from the switching shelf and connected via optical cable. Alcatel is offering dual stack IPv4/IPv6 as well as tunneling support for IPv6 over IPv4. The 7770 OBX also uses a new generation of network processors on each line card. Alcatel is also developing G-MPLS support for the platform, enabling it to be integrated with an intelligent optical transport network.
- List of Alcatel's previous acquisitions: http://www.convergedigest.com/Mergers/mergersAlcatel.htm
