CIENA will acquire privately held Internet Photonics, a supplier of carrier-grade optical Ethernet transport and switching solutions, for approximately $150 million in stock (24.4 million CIEN shares). Internet Photonics' Ethernet transport solution has gained momentum with North American cable MSOs, including deployments with six of top ten cable operators in the U.S. Carriers could also use Internet Photonics' solutions to deploy Ethernet private-line services.
Internet Photonics is based in Shrewsbury, New Jersey and Marlborough, Massachusetts. The company has approximately 110 employees. It generated approximately $5 million in revenue in Q4 and is not yet profitable.
Internet Photonics' product line includes:
- LIGHTSTACK MXA, a low-cost access device deployed at the customer premise or local CO/hub providing a managed demarcation point between the operator network and the customer and delivering Ethernet and/or SONET/SDH services.
- LIGHTSTACK MX, an access aggregation node that resides at the customer premise, hub, head-end, or central office and provides multiplexing of up to 8 GbE onto 10GigE wavelengths in a single stackable 1.75" high unit.
- LIGHTSTACK GSLAM, an aggregation solution that integrates optical transport, access service aggregation, switching, and add/drop multiplexing functionality. It can aggregate access circuits from the MXA and MX units. The platform offers the ability to crossconnect 64 Gigabit Ethernet connections.
- LIGHTHANDLER, a 40 wavelength passive optical add/drop and bi-directional optical amplifier that interfaces into existing SONET/SDH and DWDM networks. The 40 wavelength LightHandler platform, which has already been deployed by one major cable operator, provides video on demand (VOD) scalability as well as other service requirements in major metropolitan cable headends. Operators can start with a single four channel module and flexibly add modules to boost capacity to 40 channels at 10 Gbps. The product was introduced in January 2004.
- LIGHTSTACK NCS, a carrier-grade network configuration and service monitoring NMS. Its ability to simplify the tasks of network service provisioning, fault isolation, and performance monitoring makes it a powerful tool for enabling cable operators and carriers to profitably offer new Ethernet based services.
- Internet Photonics is headed by Gregory Koss, who was previously CEO of Sonoma Systems, a developer of ATM access equipment that was acquired by Nortel Networks in 2000. Its technical team is led by Dr. Martin Nuss, who was previously the Director of the Optical Data Networks Research Department at Lucent Technologies.
- Internet Photonics has raised $63 million in funding. Investors include The Sprout Group, ComVentures, Telesoft Partners, AT&T and New Venture Partners LLC, formerly the New Ventures Group at Lucent Technologies.
