Sunday, July 13, 2003

Atrica Raises $17 Million for its Metro Ethernet Switches

Atrica, a start-up based in Santa Clara, California, raised $17 Million in the first close of its fourth round of funding for its optical Ethernet gear. Atrica is currently shipping three different carrier-class optical Ethernet systems along with an integrated service provisioning and management system. The new funding includes a strategic investment from Intel Capital. The first close of the funding round also includes existing investors -- Accel Partners, Ascend Technology Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Challenge Fund, Innovacom (the venture capital subsidiary of France Telecom), Gemini Israel Fund, Investor Growth Capital, JK&B Capital, and St. Paul Venture Capital. This round of funding builds upon the $117 Million Atrica has already received from industry notables such as 3Com and from global service providers such as BellSouth, Bezeq, SBC Communications, (via Aurum-SBC Ventures), Saturn Venture Partners, and Telia.
http://www.atrica.com

  • In May 2003, announced three additions to its portfolio of carrier optical Ethernet products. Atrica's Optical Ethernet Systems -- including 10 Gigabit Ethernet and integrated WDM -- are positioned as an alternative to SONET/SDH-based equipment or RPR architectures. Key features of the Atrica optical Ethernet platform include high port densities in NEBS-compliant chassis, an MPLS architecture capable of supporting large numbers of flows, SLAs, sub-50 millisecond resiliency, integration with circuit switched networks, Ethernet CES for support of TDM traffic, and point and click OAM&P. Atrica's existing A-8000 chassis scales up to 320 Gbps and is designed for core network deployments. The new products include the A-4100 optical Ethernet aggregation switch and the A-2140 edge switch. The A-4100, which is designed for small POP environments, is an eight-slot chassis that scales up to 80 Gbps. It supports MPLS over Gigabit and 10 GigE links. The smaller, A-2140 optical Ethernet Edge switch is a customer premise device supporting a variety of 10/100/1000 Ethernet, Circuit Emulation Services (CES) of T1/E1, OC-3/STM-1 ports.


  • At the time, Atrica said it expects to ship over 50,000 optical Ethernet ports in Q2 2003. The company said over ten carrier worldwide are either testing or deploying its systems. Announced customers include: France Telecom, Al-Pi Telecomunicacions of Spain and Hokkaido Telecom Network in Japan.