PacketLight Networks Interview with Koby Reshef, VP Sales and Marketing

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) June 23, 2011 -- Introduction

Koby Reshef has over 16 years of experience in both technical and marketing aspects of the telecommunication industry, with extensive knowledge in technologies including storage networking, optical networking, ASICs and wireless communication solutions.

Before joining the Marketing team, Koby managed PacketLight's HW design team and prior to joining the company served as a senior R&D Manager at Teledata (ADC).
Introduction

PacketLight Networks, based in Tel-Aviv, Israel, was founded in 2000 and became part of the RAD Group, one of the largest telecom groups in Israel, in 2004.

The company develops and supplies a suite of metro CWDM and DWDM platforms for transport of data, voice and video applications over dark fibre and WDM networks.

As a member of the RAD Group, PacketLight has access to a worldwide network of facilities supporting R&D and back office operations, as well as an international network of distribution partners.

Production of the company's optical transport platforms is outsourced to a contract manufacturer.

PacketLight operates as a standalone profit/loss entity within RAD Group and has achieved profitability for the past two years. The company is not seeking additional funding at present.

In terms of sales, PacketLight has doubled its revenue over each of the past three years as a result of repeat business, expansion into new markets and the addition of new distributors in existing markets.

Notably, PacketLight began selling into the Central America region roughly one year ago and has already succeeded in building strong sales there.

Mr. Reshef commented that there are no disadvantages to being a part of the RAD Group and indeed membership presents opportunities for cooperation within the Group,

"PacketLight supplies a set of Layer 1 WDM solutions targeted to the enterprise and service provider fibre network, other Group companies focus on different parts of the network, for example metro Ethernet or wireless solutions. This means that together, Group companies can supply a complete network solution".
Product offering

PacketLight's focus is on providing low latency optical transport solutions for deployment in enterprise networks or for building small scale metro networks for service providers.

The company offers scalable solutions able to support a range of 1 to 88 wavelengths that can then be scaled incrementally to deliver capacity and service mix as demand dictates.

The success of PacketLight products arises from taking into account the entire set of needs of the enterprise market, such as low latency, transparent transport layer, ease of operation and maintenance, rack space, dual redundant AC power feeds, low power consumption and pluggable optics.

Thus, offering the best in carrier-grade optical transport layer performance, along with optical diagnostic and protection capabilities and performance monitoring, serves the growing bandwidth needs of the enterprise segment.

Mr. Reshef explained that the products are designed to be highly scalable while also offering a low cost entry point for the customer via a compact and resource efficient platform for low-capacity applications.

The building blocks of the platform are transponders for converting a service onto a wavelength, muxponders for multiplexing a number of services into a single wavelength, optical amplifiers and ROADMs.

Combined, these elements provide an agile network that can be as simple as a point-to-point optical link or as complex as a system spanning 6,000 km. PacketLight has installed its products for the latter application with a customer in Europe.

The PacketLight solution is also designed to be easily and quickly upgraded step-by-step in line with demand on the network, and without service interruption.

Regarding typical applications, Mr. Reshef said that a customer might be an enterprise deploying a network to support its business or a carrier delivering a managed service to an enterprise customer. The platform is claimed to deliver the highest ROI in the industry for such applications.
R&D collaboration

There is a degree of interaction between PacketLight and RAD Group in terms of research and development. As an example, RAD is currently working on a project to develop a core solution for metro Ethernet applications for which PacketLight will provide add-drop multiplexing (ADM) expertise to enable the platform to support ROADM rings in metro Ethernet networks.

It is anticipated that cooperative initiatives such as this will become more common in the future as metro Ethernet and WDM technologies are increasingly integrated into the same platforms.
Channels to market

With regards to sales channels, PacketLight has its own independent sales team and distribution partners that address markets worldwide, although RAD also sells PacketLight products.

Distributors are chosen because they understand the markets they serve and are able to provide local support that PacketLight, as a small

CWDM     dark fiber     Dark Fiber Networks     DWDM     video     voice     wireless