Tellabs checks off Osmine

Tellabs announced today that it has achieved Osmine certification for its 6400 transport switch.

“This is a great milestone for us because it allows us to have wider scale deployments into the ILECs,” said Ed Kennedy, senior vice president of Tellabs’ metro networking group. “Osmine is the ticket to get in and sell.”

Kennedy came under the Tellabs umbrella as the CEO of Ocular Networks, which developed the 6400 switch and was acquired by Tellabs in 2001. So far the 6400 has been deployed by Broadwing Communications and other unnamed providers.

Tellabs has been working with “a lot of ILECs” doing testing, but the equipment simply couldn’t be deployed until Osmine was completed, according to Kennedy. “Now we can shift to actual deployments,” he said.

Even though Tellabs failed to gain much traction with CLECs when they were the target of virtually every vendor, the company’s executives feel their unwavering focus on ILECs has helped Tellabs stay grounded and positioned better than its competitors.

“Now that a lot of vendors have cut back with R&D and next-generation platforms, Tellabs is still investing,” Kennedy said.

And to Kennedy, while some acquisitions haven’t prove profitable, he is confident the Ocular acquisition will.

“A lot of times startups get acquired and then you never hear anything about them. That’s not the case here,” Kennedy said.

Tellabs recently moved up to the top of the bandwidth management market with a 55% market share in the second quarter of 2002, according to research firm RHK. Tellabs tallied in at 40% for the same segment in the first quarter of 2002.

Separately, today startup LuxN, which develops metro optical transport gear, announced that it too has completed Osmine certification for its WavSystem optical platform. The system enables high-bandwidth services over dense and coarse WDM platforms.