April 18, 2002--The OEM agreement announced yesterday through which Fujitsu Network Communications will integrate a pair of DWDM products from ADVA Optical Networking into its Flashwave product family will open doors for ADVA that previously had remained closed -- U.S. ILECs. According to the ADVA sources, the agreement follows the company's strategy of partnering with transport vendors in different regions of the world to address carrier markets.
The deal with Fujitsu calls for ADVA to supply its Fiber Service Platform (FSP) 500 and FSP 3000, which the U.S. company will market as the Flashwave 7410 and the 7420, respectively. According to Abdul Kasim, ADVA's vice president of marketing, Fujitsu will market, sell, support, and "influence the development of" the two systems. This last element will involve cooperation on the product roadmap of the two ADVA systems, Kasim says. ADVA will supply a sales team to Fujitsu's Richardson, TX headquarters to facilitate marketing the products in the United States.
The FSP 500 is a managed fiber access system for use between MANs and the customer premises. It supports applications such as LAN and SAN extension, co-location, managed dark fiber services, ATM or SONET/SAN tail circuits, and ASP/ISP metro links. The FSP 3000 is a metro DWDM system with protocol-transparent interfaces from 100 Mbits/sec to 10 Gbits/sec. It will support 32 protected channels or 64 unprotected channels.
The link with Fujitsu follows similar deals with Siemens for the European market and with other manufacturers whom Kasim would not identify for Japan and Australia. ADVA has had success in selling its enterprise-level products directly and through resellers, says Kasim, but has found that working with established vendors in the carrier market provides the necessary leverage to get their systems in front of service providers.
Fujitsu has begun the work necessary to integrate the ADVA systems into the U.S. vendor's NetSmart 1500 element management system. It has also submitted the systems for OSMINE certification.