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At the time, it seemed the world was ending.
Lehman Brothers’ investment bank had filed for bankruptcy on Sept. 15, 2008, triggering a global financial crisis. The next night, Dino DiPerna – the head of R&D for Nortel Networks’ optical networks group – was trying to relax in his Boston hotel room when he got a call from his boss, Philippe Morin. Another shock. Morin told his colleague their group would be put up for sale the following morning.
DiPerna — a long-serving veteran of this unforgiving industry – knew there would be fallout, lots of it. Indeed, Nortel’s rivals lost no time spreading vicious gossip about the weaknesses within. They claimed Nortel’s optical business had been starved of resources, its engineering talent drained away. These and other rumours multiplied in January 2009 when Nortel sought the protection of bankruptcy court.
DiPerna knew the gossip, most of it, wasn’t true. But to convince Nortel’s customers, he and his colleagues logged hundreds of thousands of miles to reassure them in person. Another equally important mission was to prevent rivals from poaching Nortel’s best engineers.
“I’m proud to say they got very few of our people in the end,” DiPerna says. “We have a culture of sticking it out through tough times, a belief in ourselves, in our ability to innovate.”
The stretch of vast uncertainty produced an unexpected benefit.
“It was us against everybody,” DiPerna adds, “and it made us stronger.”
More to the point, DiPerna’s optical products group – known as Metro Ethernet Networks – became a highly sought property.
On March 19, 2010 – more than a year into Nortel’s gut-wrenching bankruptcy – Maryland-based Ciena shelled out $774 million US to buy the Metro Ethernet Networks unit.
The minute it did, the industry gossip stopped and a gruelling multi-year integration of the two organizations began.
Related
Now, finally, the payoff is clear.
For the past year, Kanata commuters have been treated to the rare sight of a significant new high-tech campus under construction along Terry Fox Drive just west of March Road.
Ciena employees are moving in waves from Nortel’s longtime base at Carling Avenue and Moodie Drive in the west end of Ottawa. The first group is filling an adjacent 170,600 square-foot facility at 5050 Innovation Dr. previously built by BlackBerry but never occupied. Starting in January, the rest of the Ciena workers will move into two new towers on Terry Fox Drive — comprising an additional 254,300 square feet of leased space.
By the time the new Ciena project is completed, most likely in September 2017, the cluster will house about 1,600 employees — confirming the company’s status as the region’s second-largest technology employer after Nokia.
More important than the size of the Ciena campus is its role: a majority of the company’s global R&D is done here. And when it comes to optical technology — the high-speed core of today’s Internet — Ciena is the No. 2 supplier in the world behind China’s Huawei, and No. 1 in North America.
“It was the deal of a lifetime,” says James Frodsham, Ciena’s chief strategy officer — and the guy in charge of acquiring other firms.
But it took a lot more than one risky bet to make this combo work. It required a series of them – by Ciena and Nortel alike. This is the story of how they did it.
**
If you want to understand why Ciena survived and Nortel did not, the best starting point is February 2001 – the month the telecom industry’s foundations cracked. On Feb. 9, Ciena completed the sale of convertible debt and 11 million shares for a net payoff of $1.6 billion US. The Maryland company got in just under the wire. Six days later, Nortel revealed its revenues would slow — the first of many such announcements that year.
By the end of 2001, Nortel would record annual sales of just $17 billion compared to its original forecast of $40 billion. With no end in sight to the sales slide or the multi-billion dollar annual losses, Nortel no longer had the option of shoring up its balance sheet by issuing shares to investors. No one was interested.
Former Nortel Campus on Moodie Dr.
The company’s failure to sell shares when it was flying high would leave it fatally vulnerable during the 2008-09 global financial crisis.
It was a much different situation at cash-rich Ciena, which in 2001 had the flexibility to be creative. The company reached that position not because it was extraordinarily prescient — hardly anyone in the industry saw what was coming that year. However, Ciena only had around six years of operations under its belt at the time. It was very much a startup, and extremely conscious of the need to raise money when conditions permitted. And so it did.
From 2001 to 2004 — the telecom industry’s “nuclear winter” — Ciena shelled out more than $2 billion to acquire five networking technology specialists, including Akara and Catena Networks from Ottawa. Through these purchases, Ciena considerably broadened its product lines.
“When you get these periods of great uncertainty, risk and dislocation, it’s an opportunity to change the game,” Ciena CEO Gary Smith says. “We placed some very large bets but I would say they were calculated.”
At Nortel’s Metro Ethernet Networks unit, equally big risks were being contemplated. But these were prompted by desperation rather than opportunity.
Nortel customers such as Qwest Communications and Verizon substantially pared back orders for communications gear starting in 2001. That’s when DiPerna and his engineering team knew they had a big problem — quite aside from the loss of revenues.
The issue was cost: their products were expensive to produce, something that hadn’t mattered during the telecom boom. But now it did.
Nortel had won the late 1990s global race to produce an optical transmission technology capable of pushing data through the Internet at speeds of 10 billion bits per second (10 gigabits). Bumping up the speed in next-generation systems (40 gigabits) down a similar path of technology would require the use of higher-quality optical fibre and expensive pieces of gear to regenerate signals.
Not only were customers now unwilling to pay for these technical enhancements, they still wanted higher speeds in order to accommodate the growing use of online video and other digital traffic.
DiPerna and his team spent months brainstorming together with experts in wireless technology and electro-optical devices. They reached a fateful conclusion. Rather than force customers to add expensive new optical systems, they would create technology for substantially increasing the capacity of existing optical fibre — something that demanded multiple technical breakthroughs. The team wasn’t sure it could be done.
The engineers shrank analog-to-digital converters and applied digital signal processing in unique ways. They used these building blocks to design a new 40-gigabit chip, which they unveiled in 2005 and began testing it the following year. This, in turn, formed the heart of the 40-gigabit optical system — which Nortel announced in March 2008. That was just six months before DiPerna learned Nortel would put his Metro Ethernet Networks unit up for sale.
But it was enough. The new 40-gigabit system — dubbed digital coherent optical — was becoming the industry’s new standard for sending data along the Internet’s backbone. “We bet everything on coherent,” says DiPerna, “That’s what kept us going through the 2000s.”
Ownership would soon pass from Nortel. But the good news was digital coherent technology gave the Metro Ethernet Networks unit some real value.
Ciena was one of the first potential buyers to express interest in buying it.
“We’d been looking for a long time at Metro Ethernet, especially a technology called coherent,” Ciena’s Gary Smith says. “These guys were way ahead of us.”
Ciena CEO, Gary Smith, gives a presentation on the convergence of Nortel and Ciena to former Nortel employees from Ottawa and Montreal in 2010.
James Frodsham — a Ciena executive since 2005 and a former Nortel manager — led the examination of Metro Ethernet Networks. He was familiar with Nortel’s optical technology team and knew what they were capable of doing. What neither he nor his boss Smith could be sure about was the quality of Nortel’s product line. When Nortel was losing buckets of money during the telecom crash, just how much money had been withheld from R&D? And which projects had been hurt the most?
Here is what they found: “Philippe and Dino had to a great extent protected the assets and the team from frankly all the trauma and mismanagement at the top in the broader Nortel,” Smith says. “They had managed to shoestring investments together and kept the talent. It was a big surprise.”
DiPerna’s big fear was that Metro Ethernet Networks would be sold to a firm interested only in parts of the product portfolio — resulting in the breakup of the unit and its 2,000 plus employees. Another unfavourable outcome, at least from his point of view, would have seen Nortel’s optical group disappear into the underbelly of a large multinational.
“If we’d been bought by a big company like Ericsson, we would have been just an insignificant part of a big machine,” DiPerna observes. “That’s not who we are.”
When Ciena prevailed in the bidding for Metro Ethernet Networks in 2010, DiPerna’s concerns weren’t entirely allayed. Before the telecom crash, Nortel and Ciena had competed directly in selling optical systems. What if Ciena was acquiring Metro Ethernet Networks simply to strip it of technology then shut it down?
Smith and Frodsham soon reassured him. During the nuclear winter the two firms had focused on very different parts of the optical technology puzzle. While Nortel had concentrated on core, long-haul optical systems, Ciena had acquired many of the other pieces associated with high-speed networking. While there was still some overlap, the companies complemented each other more than Diperna had expected.
James Frodsham, Senior VP and Chief Strategy Officer of Ciena speaks at the official ground breaking of the new Ciena buildings in Kanata North in 2015.
This meant merging the firms’ operations was somewhat easier than it might have been, but the costs — and risks — were still significant. Ciena estimates it spent nearly $200 million on integration and restructuring expenses ranging from consulting fees to severance costs.
Nor was the economy strong. Ciena’s revenues in 2009 had slipped to $653 million from $902 million the previous year and were recovering slowly. The loss in 2009 had topped $580 million compared to a previous year profit of $39 million.
“The economic backdrop was pretty tepid,” Smith says, “so it took us a little longer than our initial plan called for” to make the purchase of Metro Ethernet pay off.
Indeed, Ciena lost money for six straight years until 2015 when, at last, the company posted a small profit of $12 million on sales of $2.4 billion. But the pieces are finally falling into place.
Along with its acquisition last year of Cyan — a California-based networking software specialist — Ciena’s products today direct traffic along the Internet’s densest routes. A consensus forecast prepared by Thomson Reuters suggests Ciena’s revenues will grow nearly seven per cent this year and 15 per cent in 2017 to reach an estimated $3 billion, paced by increased orders for speedier optical gear and related software.
As Ciena continues acquiring other firms, the relative contribution of the company’s 1,600 Kanata employees will diminish somewhat. As of last October, the company employed 5,345 globally compared to 4,300 in 2011. Nevertheless, there is little denying the importance of the Canadians within the corporation.
The old Ciena and Nortel product lines have converged and the company’s engineers are busy jointly reinventing networking technology in optical systems, software and services. The company claims 70 per cent of its patents filed since it acquired Nortel’s Metro Ethernet Networks unit include at least one Canadian inventor.
Ciena gear is now processing video and data through optical fibre at speeds of 400 billions bits per second — in live networks the current state of the art is 200 gigabits.
“In tough times we had to pick and choose what we focused on,” says DiPerna, “but we never took our eye off innovation.”
Related
In Ciena, he found a company that has for 16 years maneuvered successfully through the post-telecom crash and a global financial crisis — transitions that Nortel failed. He also found a firm willing to collaborate with his engineers, and not treat Kanata like a branch plant R&D shop.
Will the formula continue to work? This region has seen too many spectacular failures in high-tech to answer this definitively. The sector is simply too competitive. “This is not an industry where you let up,” Frodsham agrees.
When the high-tech world crashed after 2000, peak annual sales at Ciena slumped from $1.6 billion to less than $300 million. At Nortel, revenues in the optical unit collapsed from $10 billion to just $1.5 billion. Losses at both operations were staggering.
Seen in this light, Ciena and Nortel’s optical group beat the odds simply by surviving. That they went on to jointly build a firm that claims first or second spot in most of its product lines is all the more impressive.
“People like clarity when you do these kinds of mergers,” says Smith, “We’ve invested heavily in R&D and run the business for the long-term — the results have steadily improved.”
It’s the sort of steadiness and faith in the company’s own talent that Nortel’s top executives had abandoned during their company’s heyday. More challenges loom as Ciena adapts its product lines to more software-intensive networks — more flexible systems that depend less on raw hardware.
But this time DiPerna’s engineers are pushing the edges of technology without having to worry whether their company is about to implode. It’s a world of difference from just a few years ago.
Email: jbagnall@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/JamesBagnall1
Timelines:
Ciena’s trail of acquisitions since the 2001 telecom crash:
2002: ONI Systems of California for $398M
2003: Wavesmith Networks of California for $178M
2003: Akara of Ottawa for $46M
2004: Catena Networks of Ottawa for $314M
2004: Internet Photonics of Massachusetts for $100M
2008: World Wide Packets of California for $296M
2010: Nortel’s optical products unit of Ottawa and Montreal for $774M
2015: Cyan of California for $415M
A short history of Nortel’s optical products unit
1989: Nortel launches Fibre World – its intention to build a family of optical transmission products
1993: Nortel gives the go-ahead for OC-192, which transmits data at 10 billion bits per second
1995: Secures initial order of OC-192 from MCI Communications
1996: First year of significant shipments for OC-192
Late 1990s: Upstart carriers including Worldcom and Qwest Communications place significant orders
2000: Nortel sales of fibre-optic products hit $10 billion – one-third of company revenues – making it the globe’s No. 1 supplier
2001: Telecom industry crashes as weakening stock market deprives carriers of a major source of cash. Nortel begins its historic downsizing
2001: Nortel’s optical products unit – which would become known as Metro Ethernet Networks – begins work on a novel way to increase the speed of data without forcing carriers to install new systems. The technology is dubbed “coherent optical”
2005-06: Nortel engineers unveil new chips to accomplish this
March 12, 2008: Nortel unveils industry’s first coherent technology system, to run at 40 billion bits per second
Sept. 17, 2008: Nortel announces Metro Ethernet Networks will be sold to raise cash for the rest of the firm
Jan. 14, 2009: Nortel files for bankruptcy protection, and soon offers all its business units for sale
March 19, 2010: Ciena pays $774 million to acquire Nortel’s optical products unit
2015: Construction begins on a new campus in Kanata to house 1,600 employees, most of them formerly with Nortel
2017: New Ciena campus is expected to be completed, and will manage the majority of the firm’s global R&D
查看原文...
Lehman Brothers’ investment bank had filed for bankruptcy on Sept. 15, 2008, triggering a global financial crisis. The next night, Dino DiPerna – the head of R&D for Nortel Networks’ optical networks group – was trying to relax in his Boston hotel room when he got a call from his boss, Philippe Morin. Another shock. Morin told his colleague their group would be put up for sale the following morning.
DiPerna — a long-serving veteran of this unforgiving industry – knew there would be fallout, lots of it. Indeed, Nortel’s rivals lost no time spreading vicious gossip about the weaknesses within. They claimed Nortel’s optical business had been starved of resources, its engineering talent drained away. These and other rumours multiplied in January 2009 when Nortel sought the protection of bankruptcy court.
DiPerna knew the gossip, most of it, wasn’t true. But to convince Nortel’s customers, he and his colleagues logged hundreds of thousands of miles to reassure them in person. Another equally important mission was to prevent rivals from poaching Nortel’s best engineers.
“I’m proud to say they got very few of our people in the end,” DiPerna says. “We have a culture of sticking it out through tough times, a belief in ourselves, in our ability to innovate.”
The stretch of vast uncertainty produced an unexpected benefit.
“It was us against everybody,” DiPerna adds, “and it made us stronger.”
More to the point, DiPerna’s optical products group – known as Metro Ethernet Networks – became a highly sought property.
On March 19, 2010 – more than a year into Nortel’s gut-wrenching bankruptcy – Maryland-based Ciena shelled out $774 million US to buy the Metro Ethernet Networks unit.
The minute it did, the industry gossip stopped and a gruelling multi-year integration of the two organizations began.
Related
Now, finally, the payoff is clear.
For the past year, Kanata commuters have been treated to the rare sight of a significant new high-tech campus under construction along Terry Fox Drive just west of March Road.
Ciena employees are moving in waves from Nortel’s longtime base at Carling Avenue and Moodie Drive in the west end of Ottawa. The first group is filling an adjacent 170,600 square-foot facility at 5050 Innovation Dr. previously built by BlackBerry but never occupied. Starting in January, the rest of the Ciena workers will move into two new towers on Terry Fox Drive — comprising an additional 254,300 square feet of leased space.
By the time the new Ciena project is completed, most likely in September 2017, the cluster will house about 1,600 employees — confirming the company’s status as the region’s second-largest technology employer after Nokia.
More important than the size of the Ciena campus is its role: a majority of the company’s global R&D is done here. And when it comes to optical technology — the high-speed core of today’s Internet — Ciena is the No. 2 supplier in the world behind China’s Huawei, and No. 1 in North America.
“It was the deal of a lifetime,” says James Frodsham, Ciena’s chief strategy officer — and the guy in charge of acquiring other firms.
But it took a lot more than one risky bet to make this combo work. It required a series of them – by Ciena and Nortel alike. This is the story of how they did it.
**
If you want to understand why Ciena survived and Nortel did not, the best starting point is February 2001 – the month the telecom industry’s foundations cracked. On Feb. 9, Ciena completed the sale of convertible debt and 11 million shares for a net payoff of $1.6 billion US. The Maryland company got in just under the wire. Six days later, Nortel revealed its revenues would slow — the first of many such announcements that year.
By the end of 2001, Nortel would record annual sales of just $17 billion compared to its original forecast of $40 billion. With no end in sight to the sales slide or the multi-billion dollar annual losses, Nortel no longer had the option of shoring up its balance sheet by issuing shares to investors. No one was interested.
Former Nortel Campus on Moodie Dr.
The company’s failure to sell shares when it was flying high would leave it fatally vulnerable during the 2008-09 global financial crisis.
It was a much different situation at cash-rich Ciena, which in 2001 had the flexibility to be creative. The company reached that position not because it was extraordinarily prescient — hardly anyone in the industry saw what was coming that year. However, Ciena only had around six years of operations under its belt at the time. It was very much a startup, and extremely conscious of the need to raise money when conditions permitted. And so it did.
From 2001 to 2004 — the telecom industry’s “nuclear winter” — Ciena shelled out more than $2 billion to acquire five networking technology specialists, including Akara and Catena Networks from Ottawa. Through these purchases, Ciena considerably broadened its product lines.
“When you get these periods of great uncertainty, risk and dislocation, it’s an opportunity to change the game,” Ciena CEO Gary Smith says. “We placed some very large bets but I would say they were calculated.”
At Nortel’s Metro Ethernet Networks unit, equally big risks were being contemplated. But these were prompted by desperation rather than opportunity.
Nortel customers such as Qwest Communications and Verizon substantially pared back orders for communications gear starting in 2001. That’s when DiPerna and his engineering team knew they had a big problem — quite aside from the loss of revenues.
The issue was cost: their products were expensive to produce, something that hadn’t mattered during the telecom boom. But now it did.
Nortel had won the late 1990s global race to produce an optical transmission technology capable of pushing data through the Internet at speeds of 10 billion bits per second (10 gigabits). Bumping up the speed in next-generation systems (40 gigabits) down a similar path of technology would require the use of higher-quality optical fibre and expensive pieces of gear to regenerate signals.
Not only were customers now unwilling to pay for these technical enhancements, they still wanted higher speeds in order to accommodate the growing use of online video and other digital traffic.
DiPerna and his team spent months brainstorming together with experts in wireless technology and electro-optical devices. They reached a fateful conclusion. Rather than force customers to add expensive new optical systems, they would create technology for substantially increasing the capacity of existing optical fibre — something that demanded multiple technical breakthroughs. The team wasn’t sure it could be done.
The engineers shrank analog-to-digital converters and applied digital signal processing in unique ways. They used these building blocks to design a new 40-gigabit chip, which they unveiled in 2005 and began testing it the following year. This, in turn, formed the heart of the 40-gigabit optical system — which Nortel announced in March 2008. That was just six months before DiPerna learned Nortel would put his Metro Ethernet Networks unit up for sale.
But it was enough. The new 40-gigabit system — dubbed digital coherent optical — was becoming the industry’s new standard for sending data along the Internet’s backbone. “We bet everything on coherent,” says DiPerna, “That’s what kept us going through the 2000s.”
Ownership would soon pass from Nortel. But the good news was digital coherent technology gave the Metro Ethernet Networks unit some real value.
Ciena was one of the first potential buyers to express interest in buying it.
“We’d been looking for a long time at Metro Ethernet, especially a technology called coherent,” Ciena’s Gary Smith says. “These guys were way ahead of us.”
Ciena CEO, Gary Smith, gives a presentation on the convergence of Nortel and Ciena to former Nortel employees from Ottawa and Montreal in 2010.
James Frodsham — a Ciena executive since 2005 and a former Nortel manager — led the examination of Metro Ethernet Networks. He was familiar with Nortel’s optical technology team and knew what they were capable of doing. What neither he nor his boss Smith could be sure about was the quality of Nortel’s product line. When Nortel was losing buckets of money during the telecom crash, just how much money had been withheld from R&D? And which projects had been hurt the most?
Here is what they found: “Philippe and Dino had to a great extent protected the assets and the team from frankly all the trauma and mismanagement at the top in the broader Nortel,” Smith says. “They had managed to shoestring investments together and kept the talent. It was a big surprise.”
DiPerna’s big fear was that Metro Ethernet Networks would be sold to a firm interested only in parts of the product portfolio — resulting in the breakup of the unit and its 2,000 plus employees. Another unfavourable outcome, at least from his point of view, would have seen Nortel’s optical group disappear into the underbelly of a large multinational.
“If we’d been bought by a big company like Ericsson, we would have been just an insignificant part of a big machine,” DiPerna observes. “That’s not who we are.”
When Ciena prevailed in the bidding for Metro Ethernet Networks in 2010, DiPerna’s concerns weren’t entirely allayed. Before the telecom crash, Nortel and Ciena had competed directly in selling optical systems. What if Ciena was acquiring Metro Ethernet Networks simply to strip it of technology then shut it down?
Smith and Frodsham soon reassured him. During the nuclear winter the two firms had focused on very different parts of the optical technology puzzle. While Nortel had concentrated on core, long-haul optical systems, Ciena had acquired many of the other pieces associated with high-speed networking. While there was still some overlap, the companies complemented each other more than Diperna had expected.
James Frodsham, Senior VP and Chief Strategy Officer of Ciena speaks at the official ground breaking of the new Ciena buildings in Kanata North in 2015.
This meant merging the firms’ operations was somewhat easier than it might have been, but the costs — and risks — were still significant. Ciena estimates it spent nearly $200 million on integration and restructuring expenses ranging from consulting fees to severance costs.
Nor was the economy strong. Ciena’s revenues in 2009 had slipped to $653 million from $902 million the previous year and were recovering slowly. The loss in 2009 had topped $580 million compared to a previous year profit of $39 million.
“The economic backdrop was pretty tepid,” Smith says, “so it took us a little longer than our initial plan called for” to make the purchase of Metro Ethernet pay off.
Indeed, Ciena lost money for six straight years until 2015 when, at last, the company posted a small profit of $12 million on sales of $2.4 billion. But the pieces are finally falling into place.
Along with its acquisition last year of Cyan — a California-based networking software specialist — Ciena’s products today direct traffic along the Internet’s densest routes. A consensus forecast prepared by Thomson Reuters suggests Ciena’s revenues will grow nearly seven per cent this year and 15 per cent in 2017 to reach an estimated $3 billion, paced by increased orders for speedier optical gear and related software.
As Ciena continues acquiring other firms, the relative contribution of the company’s 1,600 Kanata employees will diminish somewhat. As of last October, the company employed 5,345 globally compared to 4,300 in 2011. Nevertheless, there is little denying the importance of the Canadians within the corporation.
The old Ciena and Nortel product lines have converged and the company’s engineers are busy jointly reinventing networking technology in optical systems, software and services. The company claims 70 per cent of its patents filed since it acquired Nortel’s Metro Ethernet Networks unit include at least one Canadian inventor.
Ciena gear is now processing video and data through optical fibre at speeds of 400 billions bits per second — in live networks the current state of the art is 200 gigabits.
“In tough times we had to pick and choose what we focused on,” says DiPerna, “but we never took our eye off innovation.”
Related
In Ciena, he found a company that has for 16 years maneuvered successfully through the post-telecom crash and a global financial crisis — transitions that Nortel failed. He also found a firm willing to collaborate with his engineers, and not treat Kanata like a branch plant R&D shop.
Will the formula continue to work? This region has seen too many spectacular failures in high-tech to answer this definitively. The sector is simply too competitive. “This is not an industry where you let up,” Frodsham agrees.
When the high-tech world crashed after 2000, peak annual sales at Ciena slumped from $1.6 billion to less than $300 million. At Nortel, revenues in the optical unit collapsed from $10 billion to just $1.5 billion. Losses at both operations were staggering.
Seen in this light, Ciena and Nortel’s optical group beat the odds simply by surviving. That they went on to jointly build a firm that claims first or second spot in most of its product lines is all the more impressive.
“People like clarity when you do these kinds of mergers,” says Smith, “We’ve invested heavily in R&D and run the business for the long-term — the results have steadily improved.”
It’s the sort of steadiness and faith in the company’s own talent that Nortel’s top executives had abandoned during their company’s heyday. More challenges loom as Ciena adapts its product lines to more software-intensive networks — more flexible systems that depend less on raw hardware.
But this time DiPerna’s engineers are pushing the edges of technology without having to worry whether their company is about to implode. It’s a world of difference from just a few years ago.
Email: jbagnall@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/JamesBagnall1
Timelines:
Ciena’s trail of acquisitions since the 2001 telecom crash:
2002: ONI Systems of California for $398M
2003: Wavesmith Networks of California for $178M
2003: Akara of Ottawa for $46M
2004: Catena Networks of Ottawa for $314M
2004: Internet Photonics of Massachusetts for $100M
2008: World Wide Packets of California for $296M
2010: Nortel’s optical products unit of Ottawa and Montreal for $774M
2015: Cyan of California for $415M
A short history of Nortel’s optical products unit
1989: Nortel launches Fibre World – its intention to build a family of optical transmission products
1993: Nortel gives the go-ahead for OC-192, which transmits data at 10 billion bits per second
1995: Secures initial order of OC-192 from MCI Communications
1996: First year of significant shipments for OC-192
Late 1990s: Upstart carriers including Worldcom and Qwest Communications place significant orders
2000: Nortel sales of fibre-optic products hit $10 billion – one-third of company revenues – making it the globe’s No. 1 supplier
2001: Telecom industry crashes as weakening stock market deprives carriers of a major source of cash. Nortel begins its historic downsizing
2001: Nortel’s optical products unit – which would become known as Metro Ethernet Networks – begins work on a novel way to increase the speed of data without forcing carriers to install new systems. The technology is dubbed “coherent optical”
2005-06: Nortel engineers unveil new chips to accomplish this
March 12, 2008: Nortel unveils industry’s first coherent technology system, to run at 40 billion bits per second
Sept. 17, 2008: Nortel announces Metro Ethernet Networks will be sold to raise cash for the rest of the firm
Jan. 14, 2009: Nortel files for bankruptcy protection, and soon offers all its business units for sale
March 19, 2010: Ciena pays $774 million to acquire Nortel’s optical products unit
2015: Construction begins on a new campus in Kanata to house 1,600 employees, most of them formerly with Nortel
2017: New Ciena campus is expected to be completed, and will manage the majority of the firm’s global R&D
查看原文...
