In the Spotlight: Lambda Optical Systems' Irfan Ali

When all-optical equipment vendor Lambda Optical Systems collected $14 million in B-round funding, the company lacked a permanent CEO. This month it announced a $22-million continuation of that B round, after which new CEO Irfan Ali spoke to Telephony about what comes next.

On the technology: We’ve effectively put the technology and the product risks behind us. The basic set of products, which includes the Lambda Node 2000 as the flagship switching platform and all the software elements that go around it in terms of call control, management network design and operation etc.--that initial set of products is complete. It is in testing right now with multiple carriers, in some instances advanced testing leading up to field deployment. And additionally within a government optical network designed for R&D in a multi-agency environment. Now the focus is to take the product set and aggressively move it into the market. A lot of initiatives within the government space in North America--things like ATDNet, National Lambda Rail, OptiPuter--are all aimed at helping make optical technology mainstream. We think we’re very well positioned for that as well. So the focus now with this money will be to build a marketing and sales infrastructure that can effectively take our technological work and project it into the marketplace.

On adding staff: We’ll definitely be hiring sales and marketing people. We’ll also be hiring a few more engineering resources, but not a lot more. Previously our focus was almost entirely on engineering. We have about 56 people today, most of them in engineering. We have growth planned into the system, but that growth might not necessarily be in engineering. The additions might not necessarily be incremental. There might be a shift. We’re structured into three geographies. North America, which includes both the commercial market--carriers like MCI, Verizon, Qwest, etc.--and the federal space, which includes all the major agencies that are looking at optical technologies seriously. Then we’ve got Europe, the Middle East and Africa which is operated from our office in the UK. And then Asia Pacific, which is run out of our office in Tokyo. We’re finding a very high level of interest and strong traction in Europe. The same for certain markets in Asia, Japan being at the top of the list. In North America, the federal opportunities are probably moving forward more rapidly than the commercial opportunities. So our intent is to have a sizable presence in all these markets.

On government and research networks: The genesis of this company was within the Naval Research Labs. Dr. Battou, our founder, came out of NRL. We’re already deployed in a network called ATDNet. It’s a live deployment, a multi-agency network which is primed by NRL--NRL is the prime contractor. That network is looking to expand. The switching backbone for that network is comprised of our equipment. It’s an all-optical network with both optical switching and transport. One of the prime areas of focus for them is high-quality video. As you can imagine, in the security environment today there’s a lot of emphasis on high-resolution live video traffic that might be coming straight off of satellite. There’s about 8 such initiatives we’re involved in, all in North America. We should be able to go public with some of them as early as the first quarter of next year.

On partnerships: We’re a startup selling to some very large customers. Partnerships become very important. In a lot of instances, carriers we’re working with have preferred partners they’d like us to work with. Therefore there has to be more emphasis on the business development aspect of our operation, where we’ll be striking relationships with specific selected partners. The nature of the relationships is going to vary. In some instances, it could be as simple as resale. In other instances, it could be a deeper relationship, where the partner actually puts their own name on our product and sells and supports it entirely.

On revenue: We have some revenue. The bulk of the revenue has not happened yet. I think you'll see in the first quarter of next year is a set of announcements from us that includes a number of high-end carriers in North America, Europe and Asia, although the state of development for each account is different. In some instances, we’re actually finishing up advanced lab testing in preparation for field deployment. In some instances, we’re completing network analysis at this time.