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Ciena is bulking up its optical networking capabilities through the upcoming acquisition of TeraXion’s high-speed photonics components assets.
Officials with Ciena, which expanded its software-defined networking (SDN) portfolio last year when it bought rival Cyan for $400 million, said TeraXion’s technologies will boost Ciena’s WaveLogic coherent optical chipsets. The chipsets are designed to make the optical layer of next-generation networks more intelligent and responsive, which officials said is important for Web-scale data center environments.
Ciena is paying about $32 million for the technologies.
“The TeraXion HSPC [high-speed photonics components] assets advance Ciena’s established leadership in high-speed optics and enhance our ability to develop differentiated solutions that enable service providers to scale their networks with greater programmability and agility,” Scott McFeely, senior vice president of networking platforms at Ciena, said in a statement.
McFeely said the move also was important to the company’s growth in Canada, where most of its employees are based, including more than half of its R&D team. Ciena is based in Hanover, Md., while TeraXion is headquartered in Quebec City in Canada.
Among the assets Ciena is buying are high-speed indium phosphide and silicon photonics technologies and the associated intellectual properties. The technologies enable Ciena’s coherent optical chipsets. The company has been deploying coherent 100G since 2009 and has shipped more than 75,000 high-speed coherent line interfaces to more than 240 customers.
Also this week, Ciena introduced the WaveLogic Encryption offering, which brings enhanced optical-layer encryption capabilities for high-capacity infrastructures, from 10G through 200G and beyond, officials said.
“This builds on our years of experience in coherent optics as well as in transport-layer encryption, delivering a simple-to-implement, always-on encryption solution across all infrastructures, from metro to long-haul,” Bo Gowan, Ciena’s social media leader, wrote in a post on the company blog.
Gowan wrote that Telindus, a European service provider, is using the WaveLogic Encryption offering for 200G links with a customer in the Dutch finance industry.