Open Eye MSA Consortium targets 50/100/200/400G modules

The Open Eye Consortium has established a Multi-Source Agreement (MSA) aimed at standardizing advanced specifications for lower latency, more power efficient and lower cost 50 Gbps, 100 Gbps, 200 Gbps, and up to 400 Gbps optical modules for datacenter interconnects over single-mode and multimode fiber.

The MSA aims to accelerate the adoption of PAM-4 optical interconnects scaling to 50 Gbps, 100 Gbps, 200 Gbps, and 400 Gbps by expanding upon existing standards to enable optical module implementations using less complex, lower cost, lower power, and optimized clock and data recovery (CDR) based architectures in addition to existing digital signal processing (DSP) architectures. The idea is to minimize the use of digital signal processing in optical modules.

The Open Eye industry consortium said it is committed to developing an industry-standard optical interconnect that leverages seamless component interoperability among a broad group of industry-leading technology providers, including providers of electronics, lasers and optical components.

 The initial Open Eye MSA specification will focus on 53 Gbps per lane PAM-4 solutions for 50G SFP, 100G DSFP, 100G SFP-DD, 200G QSFP, and 400G QSFP-DD and OSFP single-mode modules. Subsequent specifications will aim to address multimode and 100Gbps per lane applications. The initial specification release is planned for Fall 2019, with product availability to follow later in the year.

MACOM and Semtech Corporation initiated the formation of the Open Eye MSA with 19 current members in Promoter and Contributing membership classes.

Promoters include Applied Optoelectronics Inc., Cambridge Industries (CIG), Color Chip, Juniper Networks, Luxshare-ICT, MACOM, Mellanox, Molex and Semtech Corporation.

Contributors include: Accelink, Cloud Light Technology, InnoLight, Keysight Technologies, Maxim Integrated, O-Net, Optomind, Source Photonics and Sumitomo Electric.

“Through its participation in the Open Eye MSA, AOI is leveraging our laser and optical module technology to deliver benefits of low cost, high-speed connectivity to next generation data centers.” David (Chan Chih) Chen, AVP, Strategic Marketing for Transceiver, AOI

“MACOM continues to drive the industry’s technical requirements towards meeting the demands of Cloud Service Providers. Leveraging our proven leadership in 25G, 50G and 100G analog chipsets and optical components, we co-founded the Open Eye MSA to accelerate the adoption of 200G and 400G PAM optical interconnects. At the same time we are working in parallel to advance the DSP technologies necessary for faster connectivity speeds for future applications.” Preet Virk, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Networks, MACOM.

Companies interested in joining the Open Eye MSA can contact: admin@openeye-msa.org.

http://www.openeye-msa.org

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MACOM announces analog CDR-Based PAM-4 portfolio

MACOM announced an analog and silicon photonics portfolio for seamless integration in 50Gbps, 100Gbps, 200Gbps and 400Gbps optical modules targeted for compliance with the newly formed Open Eye Multi-Source Agreement (MSA).

MACOM’s end-to-end transmit and receive portfolio features low-cost, low-power extensions to its existing lineup of Clock and Data Recovery (CDRs), drivers and (Transimpedance Amplifiers (TIAs), adding a companion integrated 200G FR4 L-PIC optimized to reduce customers’ module costs through dramatically improved ease of assembly, calibration and test. These components are designed to eliminate the need for expensive, power-hungry signal processing and 53Gbps EMLs, enabling streamlined optical module architectures targeted for 200G and 400G connectivity.

MACOM’s full CDR-based and L-PIC-based portfolio comprises the MAOM-38053 four-channel transmit PAM-4 CDR with an integrated driver, and an L-PIC transmitter and on the receive side, features a MATA-03819 quad TIA, MACOM BSP56B photodetectors and the MASC-38040 four-channel receive PAM-4 CDR. This approach is anticipated to deliver over 25% reduction in power consumption while simultaneously driving the cost per gigabit down as compared to today’s CWDM4 and digital signal processing (DSP)-based PAM-4 solutions. Cloud customers can now double their link rate with only minor, incremental power and cost.

“MACOM is proud to be part of an ecosystem that enables seamless component interoperability among a broad group of industry-leading technology providers, including providers of electronics, lasers and optical components,” said Preet Virk, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Networks, MACOM. “MACOM is committed to enabling the Open Eye MSA’s charter, in part by leveraging our comprehensive portfolio of high-performance analog components and L-PICs to help customers achieve optimal performance, power efficiency and cost structures. We believe that our extensive application expertise and industry leadership in PAM-4 enabling technologies will help to ensure a seamless migration from 100G CWDM4 to industry-standard 200G and 400G PAM-4 module architectures.”

https://www.macom.com/data-center

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Orange to acquire SecureLink for EUR 515 million

Orange announced an agreement with Investcorp to acquire 100% of SecureLink on a €515m enterprise value basis.

SecureLink provides a full range of cybersecurity services including specialized security consulting, security maintenance and support with 24/7 service desks (SOCs) as well as advanced managed detection and response capabilities (MDR). The group is also a leading value-added reseller of security software and hardware solutions, holding more than 1,000 technical or sales accreditations with blue chip security vendors.

SecureLink was founded in 2003 and is based in the Netherlands with over 660 employees and 14 office. In 2018, SecureLink recorded IFRS revenues of €248m.

Orange said the acquisition makes it one of the European leaders of cybersecurity with c.1,800 employees, more than €600m PF revenues in 2018 and strong positions in major local markets through its unique European DNA and a comprehensive cybersecurity services offering.

Orange is already a leading player in the French market through Orange Cyberdefense (€303m revenues in 2018, up 12% vs. 2017).

“Cybersecurity is a growing priority for companies of all sizes, and we believe the two most important success factors are Scale and Proximity. Scale because today's threats are global, complex, and require matching protection capabilities. Proximity because in the global IT world, you want a trusted local partner to secure your most strategic assets. With the acquisition of SecureData and SecureLink, Orange has the highest scale to anticipate and fend off attacks, as well as local defense teams in all the main European markets, positioning the combined organisation as the go-to defense specialist.” said Hugues Foulon, Executive Director of Cybersecurity at Orange. “I am looking forward to building the integrated organisation with Michel [Van Den Berghe, CEO of Orange Cyberdefense], Thomas Fetten and all the teams”.

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Qualcomm and Google enable 5G app tuning on Android

Qualcomm is working with Google to optimize applications for 5G using developer APIs in Android Q.

Specifically, the next release of Android will allow applications to detect the performance of 5G connectivity on Android devices, allowing the application to optimize the experience for multi-gigabit speeds and ultra-low latency.

The companies said that the exposure of new network performance information such as 5G throughput estimation will enable applications to deliver superior quality video, audio and responsiveness, while opening doors to the next wave of breakthrough applications and 5G-enabled experiences.

“4G enabled a new wave of disruptive mobile applications and services, essentially serving as the foundation for the smartphone revolution, and we believe 5G will be even more transformative,” said Francesco Grilli, vice president, product management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

“Android is the platform for innovation, proven by the speed with which it is able to embrace technological advances like 5G,” said Bob Borchers, vice president of marketing, platforms and ecosystems, Google. “We’re excited to collaborate with Qualcomm Technologies at Google I/O to support developers and the larger ecosystem in unlocking 5G’s full potential.”

https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2019/05/07/qualcomm-enables-developers-power-5g-app-revolution-android

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Lumentum cites growth in ROADMs and lasers

Lumentum reported revenue of  $432.9 million for its fiscal third quarter ended March 30, 2019 compared to $373.7 million in the preceding quarter and $298.8 million for the same period last year. GAAP net loss for the quarter attributable to common stockholders of $(74.3) million, or $(0.98) per diluted share.

"The third quarter continued a theme that started more than a year ago for our ROADM and fiber laser product lines. For the fifth quarter in a row, we achieved double digit sequential, quarterly revenue growth and new record revenues for these product lines driven by strong customer demand for our new and differentiated products," said Alan Lowe, President and CEO.

"The third quarter was the first full quarter since completion of the acquisition of Oclaro.  We made solid progress on integrating the companies and attaining synergies, including the divestiture and planned exit of certain datacom product lines.  This continued progress results in our fourth quarter projected operating margins being sequentially higher on lower revenues after the divestiture and positions us well for achieving our long-term strategic goals."

http://investor.lumentum.com/investors/default.aspx

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Fastweb tests 500G Single-wavelength Connectivity with Infinera

Fastweb, a major Italian telecommunications operator, has demonstrated 500G single-wavelength service connectivity in a production network using Infinera’s configurable technology on the Groove platform. The trial spanned over 180 km on Fastweb’s low-latency long-haul backbone network, between Milan and Turin.

Infinera said the 500G single-wavelength trial demonstrated Fastweb’s capability to easily and efficiently scale its infrastructure network to meet the increasing bandwidth demands of its end-user customers. The trial was implemented over Fastweb’s existing optical infrastructure without special amplifiers, tuning, or changes.

Infinera’s 7300 Multi-Haul Transport Platform, mTera Universal Switching Platform and Groove 600G technology are part of Fastweb’s backbone network spanning over 650 nodes and providing the flexibility and future development and delivery of a range of programmable high-speed end-user services at 400G, 500G, and up to 600G. Infinera’s solution enables Fastweb to scale internet exchange point capacity up to 24 terabits per second, while offering ease of deployment and network investment efficiency.

“Providing our customers with resilient, high-quality, and innovative solutions is in Fastweb’s DNA,” said Andrea Lasagna, Chief Technology Officer, Fastweb. “As the market for high-performance long-haul transport continues to grow at an accelerated pace, a scalable and simple network approach is required to satisfy the growing demand for bandwidth. This trial confirms the outstanding performance provided by Infinera’s innovative solution, which enables us to deliver a best-in-class customer experience at the highest transmission speeds.”

“We are pleased to extend our technology partnership with Fastweb to bring the benefits of cutting-edge coherent optical transmission to their customers,” said Glenn Laxdal, Senior Vice President, Product Line Management, Infinera. “Our ability to introduce higher-speed transmission over existing infrastructures is a key part of our mission to help our customers effectively meet their increasing bandwidth needs.”

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Sprint delivers 5G at Google I/O event

During Google’s annual developer festival at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California, Sprint is using Ericsson 5G Massive MIMO radios to deliver over-the-air dual-connectivity with 60 MHz of 2.5 GHz on LTE and 40 MHz of 2.5 GHz on 5G NR. Demonstrations include YouTube 4K video streaming, gaming, and augmented reality using the LG V50 ThinQ 5G.

"5G will drive new levels of innovation and progress around the world, and it’s the developers that will make it happen," said Ryan Sullivan, Vice President of Product Engineering and Development at Sprint. "We’re excited to work with the Android community as it develops disruptive new 5G services across all industries from entertainment to healthcare, energy, public safety, transportation and more."

Sprint continues to advocate for a merger with T-Mobile to rapidly build a nationwide 5G network.

http://newsroom.sprint.com/network

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Sprint previews 5G launch, reports declining revenue

Sprint's 5G is currently on-air in a limited number of locations and the company plans to begin commercial service in parts of Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas and Kansas City by the end of June. 5G service in  Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, Phoenix and Washington D.C.  Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, Phoenix and Washington D.C. will also be introduced.


The announcement came as part of Sprint's 2018 financial report.

Sprint reported 2018 wireless service revenue of $22.5 billion, along with a net loss of $1.9 billion and operating income of $398 million, both of which included a preliminary non-cash charge of $2 billion. Adjusted EBITDA amounted to $12.8 billion in fiscal year 2018.

"Sprint delivered on its plan for fiscal 2018, as we met all of our financial guidance for the year," said Sprint CEO Michel Combes. "While we've made progress, there are certainly continued challenges to address, which will continue to put pressure on our service revenue and retail customer growth."

Further network updates

• Sprint now has 2.5 GHz spectrum deployed on approximately 80 percent of its macro sites.
• Sprint currently has approximately 30,000 outdoor small cells deployed including both mini macros and strand mounts.
• Sprint has deployed approximately 1,500 Massive MIMO radios, which increase the speed and capacity of the LTE network and, with a software upgrade, will provide mobile 5G service in select cities in the coming weeks.

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MACOM sees drop data center business, predicts recovery in 2H19

MACOM reported revenue of $128.5 million for its fiscal second quarter ended March 29, 2019, a decrease of 14.6% compared to $150.4 million in the previous year fiscal second quarter and a decrease of 14.7% compared to $150.7 million in the prior fiscal quarter. Gross profit was $57.3 million, a decrease of 12.6% compared to $65.6 million in the previous year fiscal second quarter and a decrease of 25.2% compared to $76.6 million in the prior fiscal quarter.

“Fiscal Q2 was a challenging quarter as the magnitude of the Data Center inventory correction has been deeper and more disruptive than we originally anticipated. However, some customers are indicating they will be exiting the quarter at more normalized inventory levels, which is a leading indicator of a recovery in the second half of the year,” said John Croteau, President and CEO of MACOM.

“Despite this temporary, albeit precipitous market correction in Data Centers, the fundamental demand drivers for each of our growth opportunities remain intact with several potentially coming to fruition simultaneously."

https://ir.macom.com/news-releases/news-release-details/macom-reports-fiscal-second-quarter-2019-financial-results

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Kaloom and Linux Foundation open Virtual Central Office lab

Kaloom, in partnership with Linux Foundation, announced the availability of a Virtual Central Office (VCO) 3.0 lab in Montreal that is designed for multi-vendor Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) deployments at the distributed cloud edge.

The lab offers a unified Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform application infrastructure for Virtual Network Functions/Cloud Native Network Functions (VNF/CNF) vendors to test their applications.

Virtual Central Office (VCO) is a solution for multi-vendor NFV deployments in the traditional telco central office and at the distributed cloud edge. The solution is designed to be used for residential, enterprise and mobile VCO services by telcos and enterprises. The VCO 3.0 initiative, currently under development, defines a cloud native multi-vendor Central Office with an initial focus on mobile services with a lab setup designed for both virtual machine based VNFs and cloud native container-based CNFs in a full 5G architecture.

Kaloom provides a fully automated virtualized CO networking solution together with Red Hat’s NFV infrastructure.

Kaloom’s Software Defined Fabric™ and Cloud Edge Fabric solutions leverage a programmable multi-Tbps fabric to increase the performance and to lower the latency for NFV application servers and storage. It also provides customers a way to program their infrastructure using the open standards-based P4 programming language to add new services quickly. The solution enhances CPU utilization for VNF applications and embeds sophisticated service chaining offload to the data plane to accelerate the overall performance and lower latency even further. Sophisticated end-to-end network slicing is supported natively in the fabric with full tenant isolation down to the hardware level for better security. Network slicing is a key innovative aspect of 5G architectures that provides customers their own virtual network slice for a better quality of experience.

“Our Cloud Edge Fabric solution was designed to address the key requirements for the cloud edge market, such as lowering latency and improving performance at a lower price. We believe that automation, unified VNF/CNF, programmability and network slicing will disrupt the way service providers deploy and manage cloud edge data centers, and we are very excited to demonstrate these capabilities with the community in the VCO 3.0 lab in Montreal,” said Laurent Marchand, CEO at Kaloom.

“We are very pleased to help launch the VCO 3.0 lab in Montreal together with our members. This enables us to bring the open networking community closer together with multiple vendors to test VNFs and CNFs in containers for different 5G, cloud native and edge use cases, and demos” said Heather Kirksey, vice president, community and ecosystem development, the Linux Foundation.

https://www.kaloom.com/press-release-vco3-lab-availability?utm_content=91139926

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ADVA delivers NFV platform for Intel Select for uCPE

ADVA's Ensemble Connector, which is a carrier-class virtualization platform equipped for automated deployment at scale, has been verified as an Intel Select Solution for uCPE.

Ensemble Connector provides NFV infrastructure and offers several key benefits for uCPE, including platform security, zero touch provisioning and access to the Ensemble Harmony Ecosystem of VNFs. Ensemble Connector built on Intel Xeon D processors is an optimized configuration that gives customers a hardware-software solution that is pre-integrated and ready to deploy.
“The age of service-specific hardware is gone. In order to take advantage of the latest innovation and rapidly respond to customer demands, communication service providers (CSPs) need the power of software-based service creation at the network edge. Our Ensemble Connector, integrated with the full range of performance-optimized Intel servers, creates the perfect solution for the delivery of demanding uCPE applications,” commented James Buchanan, GM, Edge Cloud, ADVA.

https://www.advaoptical.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/20190507-adva-delivers-nfv-platform-for-intel-select-solution-for-ucpe

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Ingram Micro adds Xilinx accelerator cards to catalog

Ingram Micro has been named a primary distributor for Xilinx's new Alveo data center accelerator cards.

Ingram Micro will distribute the Xilinx cards to channel partners throughout the United States. Xilinx said channel partners will help speed the deployment of the cards in industry standard servers, ultimately optimizing the solutions for customers’ shifting data center workloads, new standards and evolving algorithms.

• In October, as part of its updated data center strategy, Xilinx announced its own portfolio of accelerator cards for industry-standard servers in cloud and on-premise data centers. The new Alveo PCIe cards are powered by the Xilinx UltraScale+ FPGA, are available now for production orders. Customers can reconfigure the hardware, enabling them to optimize for shifting workloads, new standards, and updated algorithms.

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Exabeam raises $75 Million for smarter SIEM

Exabeam, a start-up based in San Mateo, California, closed $75 million in Series E funding for its next-gen Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions.

Exabeam claims that over the past year 76 percent of its replacement deals eliminated legacy vendors, including IBM, McAfee, RSA, LogRhythm, Micro Focus and Splunk. In addition, Exabeam has a 72 percent win rate in replacement deals against these incumbents. Technology and services giant NTT DATA is just one example of a global deployment where Exabeam displaced multiple legacy SIEMs and the company standardized on Exabeam going forward.

“Over the last year, we’ve seen our strategic value increase, and our average deal size has grown by 100 percent from just two years ago. This is because we’re listening to our customers and delivering the innovative technologies they need, including, most recently, the ability to detect threats in the cloud. With the win rates we’re seeing and market opportunity in replacement business, we’re raising money to accelerate our go-to-market and enhance our products to bring additional innovation to modern SOC environments,” said Nir Polak, Exabeam CEO.

The latest round was jointly led by new investor Sapphire Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from other existing investors.

https://www.exabeam.com

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