On the heels of its merger with fellow Swedish optical networking firm Lumentis, Transmode today announced its official launch into North America with the formation of Transmode Inc., which will be based on Plano, Texas. Anders Lundberg, formerly the CEO of Lumentis, will be CEO and will head up the North American initiative.
The announcement comes just days before the merged Transmode will come to the United States for SUPERCOMM where it will showcase its combined product line, which pairs Transmode’s CWDM systems with Lumentis’ DWDM systems. The combined company also plans a new product to be announced next week in Chicago at the industry’s largest trade event.
“The significance of our new launch in North America is bringing a solution that is more targeted to the carrier market, more targeted toward the infrastructure for triple-play services,” says Michael Crossey, vice president of marketing and business development for Transmode
The legacy Transmode company has maintained a sales office in the United States, but Crossey says it was in support of customers that had purchased its CWDM systems for “one-off deployments,” such as point-to-point data centers or campus-to-campus private lines.
Crossey says the new Transmode’s broader solution is well suited to North American carrier market. It allows network operators to build metro rings in densely populated urban areas that require a high number of wavelengths delivered to a large number of network nodes. The patented DWDM system architecture supports up to 20 nodes and 40 wavelengths per ring without the need for amplification. According to the company, this can lower first deployment cost by up to 60 percent and allows between three and five times as many nodes per ring as competing systems. At the same time, the company claims, operational costs can be lowered by 25 percent to 30 percent because of the reduced complexity of unamplified systems and the ease of capacity upgrades.
Crossey says Transmode has thousands of systems deployed across more than 100 customers, which have been primarily enterprises and smaller telcos in Europe. Separately, the companies were beginning to gain traction with some larger service provider clients like NTL, the United Kingdom’s largest MSO, he says. And, May 26 the combined entity announced its first major PTT customer in Norway’s Telenor, which will use the Transmode solution for the build-out of Telenor's CWDM network, which will be used in part to support backhaul of data traffic from Telenor's broadband network.
“That’s an endorsement of the breadth of the WDM system portfolio that the new Transmode brings,” says Crossey. “It’s an acknowledgement that we are firmly on the map as a company. We’ve moved well beyond the startup stage.”
In a press statement Lundberg says his first priority is to secure the firm’s 2005 revenue objectives. “In parallel, I will be executing our three-pronged channel strategy: driving direct sales with regional operators including our existing U.S. customers, expanding our network of value-added resellers, and developing our relationship with OEM partners.”
He also says he will be seeking partnerships with companies in the data and storage networking sectors to further strengthen Transmode’s position in vertical markets.
