Calient Networks, a maker of photonic switching systems
and
software, has tacked on an additional $15 million to its fourth round
of
financing.
The latest round comes as carriers that the company supplies with switching systems prepare for new rollouts of Voice over IP
New investors Wall Street Technology Partners and DuPont Capital
Management
joined existing backers Enterprise Partners Venture Capital, TeleSoft
Partners and Sofinnova Ventures.
The San Jose, Calif.-based company’s switching systems are used by large telecoms, research
labs,
commercial video and governmental networks. It has done especially well
in
Asia-Pacific and Japan, where carriers may move faster than their U.S.
counterparts because of differences in government regulations, said Ron Mackey, Calient’s
vice president of marketing.
While there’s lingering questions about the strength of the overall
telecom
recovery, high-end optical networking purchases are showing strength
because
of the rollouts of new initiatives.
One example is Voice over Internet protocol
being
deployed by most major carrier and cable service providers to consumer
and
business customers alike.
“VoIP networks have a tendency to have higher churn rates. Connections
keep
coming and going,” Mackey said. “There are a lot of things happening in
an
IP network that aren’t coming into play in a traditional network.”
For similar reasons, Calient is encouraged by the commitment of several
telecoms to pursue fiber-to-the-premises
Communications expects to bring
fiber to one million homes by year’s end. Management of the system
will
require new systems.
Calient has worked with Verizon in the past but has not been named as a
vendor for the fiber rollout, Mackey said.
To date, the company has raised a total of $285 million from a number
of
firms, including gear maker Juniper Networks .
“This money is earmarked to take us to profitability,” Mackey told internetnews.com. “We’ve been shipping product and generating revenue for two years and now we are ramping
production.”
The privately held company doesn’t release financial
figures, and Mackey declined to say when Calient expected to turn a profit.
For some high-end switch jobs, Calient, which has about 70 employees,
competes with heavy hitters like Ciena , Nortel
and Lucent
.
