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Stuart Garfield
Friday, March 20, 2009
Polatis plans to make optical network sector shine again
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Optical networking — particularly optical switching — was once one of New England’s most promising technology sectors. But as the all-optical network sputtered during takeoff in the early 2000s, so did the region’s cluster.
In Andover, a company whose roots trace back to the glory days of New England’s optical networking industry is hoping its new switch will leverage a growing interest in optical components and bring back at least some of the luster to the local networking sector.
Polatis Inc., in its current incarnation, was formed in 2005 when Billerica-based optical components maker Continuum Photonics Inc. merged with British optical switch maker Polatis Ltd. The deal brought together two surviving optical players and almost immediately yielded a series of optical switching products for test environments and other small applications. This week, however, the company launched a larger scale all-optical switch aimed at larger networks, including those of large carriers.
“We’ve been building product for smaller-sized output, but we’ve had the best performance out there,” said Polatis CEO Gerald Wesel, the former chairman and CEO of Merrimack, N.H.-based Ellacoya Networks Inc. (acquired by Lexington’s Arbor Networks Inc. last year) and founder of Boxborough’s Agile Networks Inc. (acquired by Lucent Technologies Inc. in 1996). “But carriers were interested in getting a larger-scale box for production networks.”
In techno-speak, the new box can handle 80 fibers per switch, as opposed to Polatis’ previous version, which worked with 32 fibers. The boxes can also be configured together, allowing for carrier-grade scalability.
For carriers and consumers, the promise of an all-optical switch means faster networks, but more importantly makes it possible to re-route data streams if something goes wrong in the network, reducing downtime or “skips” for end users, and eliminating the need to send personnel and trucks into the field to provision new services. The upshot — faster, cheaper and more reliable connectivity.
According to Jennifer Pigg, a vice president in the network research group at Boston’s Yankee Group, the time is right for a second look at all-optical switching. While most network components include optical and electronic elements, that architecture is aimed at multi-protocol networks. With the core essentially an all-Internet-protocol network, and other networks running on Ethernet, multi-protocol switching is becoming obsolete, she said.
“People are looking for faster and cheaper, and people are looking at their traditional routing strategies and asking if there are better ways,” said Pigg. “With what they (Polatis) have in terms of cost and speed, they’ll get some interest from carriers.”
The market hasn’t exactly exploded for Polatis yet — officials put the annual revenue for the 80-person company at about $10 million — but Wesel said now that fiber has a much broader range of applications the market could be orders of magnitude larger than in 2000, or even just a few years ago.
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