Overture's Ceterus buy mixes carrier Ethernet markets

For the most part, Howard said, carriers don’t look to buy their mobile backhaul gear from the same source as their business services gear. “However, every service provider is looking to simplify their operations, and fewer vendors is good,” he said. “Quite a few backhaul transport providers, not the mobile operators themselves, like to get double use out of the products they install, such as the North American [cable] MSOs. They like to offer services for mobile backhaul and any small/medium businesses near the cell site off the same gear.”

Aggregation gear is perhaps the area where the two companies’ markets intersect the most, with the least amount of difference in customer requirements, but both vendors say their product overlap is limited even there, because Ceterus’s aggregation box (which is also a pseudowire gateway) is much larger than Overture’s, making them best suited for different places in the network.

“[Carriers] don’t want to have one aggregation system for backhaul and another for business services,” said Jeff Reedy, Overture’s chief executive officer.

Overture and Ceterus say they will look to combine feature sets among their products in the future.

Neither company had a standalone network management system for its gear, making the combination of product portfolios simpler.