Rob,
My understanding is that Sycamore's products map ATM, IP etc over a proprietary switch fabric to the optical fiber. Therefore, the product would likely be a great acquisition for a Ciena. I feel that the founding members are going to take the company public, having invested in the company themselves.
I am more familiar with the east coast ventures and am therefore not familiar with Monterrey..
CHELMSFORD, MA., March 8, 1999...Sycamore Networks, Inc., designated one of the hottest start ups of 1998, today announced the company's first products, representing a record breaking time-to-market for carrier-class optical network solutions. The intelligent optical transport and switching products mark the execution of the first phase of Sycamore's intelligent optical networking strategy.
Also announced today is a significant first order from Williams Communications, a unit of Williams (NYSE:WMB). The $24.5 million order covers products that, beginning in March, will be deployed into the Williams Multi-Service Broadband Network™. Williams Communications' network is the fourth largest nationwide fiber-optic network in the United States, with 17,000 route miles lit and in service, 19,000 miles of fiber in the ground and plans to expand to 32,000 route miles connecting 125 cities by the end of 2000.
"As a wholesale network provider, we plan to engage our optical designs and deliver new services quickly and cost effectively through the deployment of Sycamore Networks' solutions, " said Joe Turcotte, senior vice president, Engineering Operations, for Williams Network. "This strategy enables us to begin to provision services over lightpaths for our customers. As we close in on the completion of our nationwide, 32,000 mile fiber-optic multi-service network, we will continue to provide voice, video and data traffic support over a single platform. The Sycamore products will begin our transition to an optical end-to-end network."
The new Sycamore products, the SN 6000 and the SN 8000 series, uniquely address service provider issues of network congestion, scaling and fast and cost-effective delivery of new services. To leverage the capacity in service provider networks—represented by more than 20 million kilometers of installed fiber-optic cable—requires transforming raw capacity into usable bandwidth for new service delivery.
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"Service providers are facing a new competitive environment where traditional planning, long term depreciation and slow deployment of services are no longer acceptable to support the incredible growth in data-centric communications," said Gururaj "Desh" Deshpande, Sycamore's founder and chairman. "Our goal is to simplify the network infrastructure so that new services and bandwidth can be deployed when and where needed. Our approach is to bring innovative solutions to market quickly with a software-centric architecture that enables true 'plug and play' products that are easy to configure, provision and manage."
Sycamore is a start up with a service provider heritage. The company is led by the former Cascade Communications management team, and combines significant experience in carrier-class data networking with expertise in optics.
Commented Sycamore President and CEO Dan Smith, "Our emphasis is on service delivery and generating revenue for service providers, not on participating in the 'wavelength wars.' Sycamore is focused on the issues of service provisioning, performance and management. By leveraging state-of-the-art, off the shelf optical components, we can focus our efforts on the development of network and system software, easing the technology evolution and reducing time to market."
New Products Optimized To Deliver Services Over Lightpaths
Currently SONET/SDH (Synchronous Optical NETwork/Synchronous Digital Hierarchy)—a transmission standard originally developed for circuit-oriented voice networks—provides the transmission foundation for public networks. SONET/SDH networks mandate a rigid architecture that is limited in its ability to scale to support high- speed services. Forklift upgrades are required to increase capacity—a task that is expensive and takes months to implement. With this infrastructure, service providers are constrained in the ability to increase bandwidth and provide new services quickly.
Sycamore's new products address scaling and service delivery issues across a wide spectrum of applications. Currently, long-distance service provider backbone networks run at very high speeds, typically OC-192 (10 Gbps). The demand to provision high-speed private lines off the backbone to ISPs and large enterprises is significant. Provisioning new private lines—at OC-48 speeds—currently requires the installation of significant additional SONET equipment that can take months to install.
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Sycamore's SN 6000 Intelligent Optical Transport Node delivers long haul OC-48 private lines, ATM and/or IP trunk services economically and "just in time." The SN 6000 leverages the existing SONET OC-192 infrastructure to deploy new services over lightpaths, making provisioning as simple as plugging in a card. With a small footprint, the SN 6000 takes up minimal space, and reduces costs, power requirements and the time to provision new services.
The family of SN 8000 optical transport and switching products represent the first products to deliver services over lightpaths for access, interoffice and regional applications. The family includes the SN 8000 and SN 8400 intelligent optical add/drop nodes, which initially extend to distances of 500 kilometers without regeneration and provide 1-44 wavelengths. The SN 860 is an optical networking adapter that transforms the existing SONET/SDH infrastructure into an optical networking infrastructure easily and economically.
"Amazing! With this announcement, Sycamore Networks has completely changed the landscape of optical networking," said Frank Dzubeck, president, Communication Networks Architects. "To go from product inception to ship in nine months is unheard of in optical product development. Delivering a software-based intelligence to DWDM optical networking for the automation of labor intensive tasks, such as wavelength provisioning and maintenance, is a first in the industry. Bringing 'just-in-time' assembly technology and procedures to optical product manufacturing, thereby lowering customer costs is an absolute first in the industry. Sycamore's new optical network architecture is based upon customer cost-driven solutions that can be implemented now, to immediately address service provider scaling, availability and service delivery issues. Service provider optical transport decisions can now be based on cost, value-added operational software, intelligent feature richness and availability of products rather than promises and the potential of future additional wavelength and bandwidth capacity."
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The SN 6000 and SN 8000 series of products combine innovative optical networking software with the intelligence and restoration capabilities of SONET/SDH and with the capacity of DWDM (Dense Wave Division Multiplexing) to deliver services over lightpaths. And the Sycamore products do not require the expensive optical/electrical conversions associated with a SONET/SDH infrastructure. The products will enable service providers to prepare the existing infrastructure for optical networking, eliminate the need for standalone SONET/SDH equipment for new services, and provide "just in time" bandwidth and service delivery by bringing "plug and play" to the optical domain.
All Sycamore products are supported by a carrier-class optical network management system, which operates either as a standalone system or may be integrated into an existing network management system hierarchy.
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