That trend, naturally, shows up in its full-year numbers. For fiscal 2012, Ciena generated revenues of $1.83 billion, up about 5 percent year-on-year, and a net loss of $144 million. Its full-year non-GAAP loss was 23.5 million, or 24 cents per share, slightly worse than Wall Street had expected.
Ciena’s not alone, of course, in feeling the effects of a shrinking optical market. (See Margin Misery for Alcatel-Lucent.)
Overlay networks as proposed by companies such as Nicira Networks Inc. , now owned by VMware Inc. (NYSE: VMW), are “an important step, but what if you had a data center that had to serve 10,000 customers, and every customer had a complex topology? That’s the real world, and that’s not easy,” Alwan says.
AlcaLu wants to see policy infused into SDN early on. Ideally, the network would tap a user profile — or a virtual machine’s profile — to help it make on-the-fly decisions about what to do with traffic coming from (or being sent to) a virtualized application.
Total bid costs were the sum of Layer 2 hardware (and software), Layer 3 hardware (and software), Layer 2 maintenance, Layer 3 maintenance, training, and taxes and shipping. Cisco’s cost in each respective category was $51 million; $18.7 million; $34.3 million; $10.6 million; $1 million; and $7 million.
Alcatel-Lucent’s was $14.5 million; $2.5 million; $1.8 million; $798,000; $777,000; and $1.7 million.
via Cisco network really was $100 million more.
The comments in response to this article are superb and well worth the read. If you don’t drill down far enough this comment stood out for me (highlights mine).
it comes down to a architected solution vs best of breed. If you just want routing and switching (speeds and feeds) – -take it to bid and bid on the lowest vendor. Although there are still some advantages inherent within each product – you’re going to get what you get. But you can’t get business value out of switching and routing – its the applications! In SJSUs case – I laud the concept that you buy an architecture. If you need to deliver business applications like conferencing, video, call processing, presence/IM service, and contact center… as it appears sjsu was looking to do … why not buy the architecture that has been integrated and purpose built for the applicaitons. That is why SJSU is saying Cisco was the only vendor that had a solution. ALU doesn’t, brocade doesnt, HP doesnt…. the alternative is you could go to bid for each of these, take over a year to do it, once purchased, hire an IBM, Accenture, or build your own team to integrated them all, and then what do you have… a HUGE expense and stovepiped systems that don’t truly deliver the needs of the business today or tomorrow
Any college with a reputable Computer Science program should have many decent graduate students able to solve integrating applications from various vendors reducing the problem set to just speeds and feeds. It’s also not a good idea to buy into an architecture that ties one to a single vendor for applications.
Vectoring, the market term for the ITU’s G.993.5 standard (also known as G.Vector), is a noise cancellation technology that reduces the interference between bundled copper lines and boosts the speed and reach of VDSL2 broadband connections. It is also known as DSM (Dynamic Spectrum Management) Level 3.
If AlcaLu can deliver effective vectoring capabilities using installed CPE, then that’s only going to expand the market potential for its system, especially as more operators look for ways to extend the useful life of their copper plant before taking the plunge into fiber-to-the-home (FTTH).
Standard optical fiber transmits 1.7Tbps over core network.
Chinese telecommunications provider ZTE held a field demonstration of an optical network capable of transmitting 1.7Tbps, the company announced today. The network used Wavelength Division Multiplexing to achieve the thousand-gigabit speeds, which separates data into different wavelengths and transmits those wavelengths over the same optical fiber. In ZTE’s demonstration, the company used 8 different channels, each transmitting 216.4Gbps. The transmission was conducted in China over 1,087 miles, on a standard fiber-optic cable.
From the linked article:
ZTE isn’t the only vendor that has conducted demonstrations to show its prowess when it comes to next-generation WDM systems. Last week, ZTE’s Chinese competitor Huawei showed a prototype system that can handle 400Gbps per channel and offer a total capacity of 20Tbps.
I wonder where Tellabs or Lucent equipment is in all of this.