Alcatel plans to acquire three-year-old Silicon Valley company TiMetra Networks, which specializes in IP/MPLS service routing at the network edge, for approximately $150 million in Alcatel American Depositary Shares and shares.
With the addition of TiMetra's products, Alcatel says customers will be able to better exploit IP to provision a range of value-added services such as SLA-based virtual private networks and virtual private LANs.
The equipment from TiMetra, which is staffed primarily by former Nortel Enterprise Products Division employees, promises to help service providers add new revenue-generating services by delivering technologies that let operators guarantee SLAs and scale.
Over the last several years service providers have spent a lot of time and money building out their IP backbones, yet the only service they offer on those backbones are Internet services, Kevin Macaluso, TiMetra’s vice president of marketing and product management, told XCHANGE during a recent interview. Service providers want to evolve backbones to MPLS capability so those backbones can be the primary source of point-to-point and multipoint business services like VPN and private data offerings that are SLA capable, he said.
TiMetra in the interview with XCHANGE this spring talked of its plans to unveil at SUPERCOMM next month a next-generation family of service routers for the edge and core. The company said it was already working with several large carrier customers.
Alcatel’s purchase of TiMetra is expected to close within the third quarter of 2003. Once the acquisition is completed, TiMetra will be integrated into Alcatel USA.
