Five months after announcing it was buying Sirocco Systems, Sycamore Networks Inc. (Nasdaq: SCMR) is reaping the benefits. Today it announced that the SN 3000 and SN 4000 optical access switches, derived from Sirocco, are shipping to customers and that the platforms are fully integrated into the Sycamore portfolio of products.

This is good news for Sycamore, which paid $2.9 billion for the startup back in June (see Sycamore Gains Access). At the time, Sirocco didn’t have any products to speak of. But with the announced shipment the vendor seems to be on track with its original promise, which was to have products to customers by the end of the year.

The SN 3000 and SN 4000, which are designed to aggregate, groom, and switch optical data traffic in the metropolitan area network, are now supported by the same SILVX network management software and BroadLeaf open optical signaling and routing software used in Sycamore's core SN 8000 and SN 16000 products.

"This is a big positive for Sycamore," says Max Schuetz, an optical networking analyst at Thomas Weisel Partners. “There are a lot companies vying for a piece of this market, and having products that can communicate with other products further back in the network is an important differentiator.”

Sycamore's integration strategy has made significant progress toward enabling service providers to provision services end-to-end through software. In contrast, the products that Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) acquired in buying Cerent and Monterey still can't communicate with each other; the Monterey box hasn't yet shipped. And the gear Lucent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: LU) bought from Chromatis is still not integrated with its other products.

“Integration of different product lines is very difficult to do,” says Schuetz. “The fact that they can pull off this level of integration in a relatively short period of time is really impressive.”

Sycamore also announced that LDCOM Networks, a European broadband communications provider, has signed an agreement to buy SN 3000 and SN 4000 switches. Terms of the contract were not disclosed in the press release that hit the wires this morning. The provider is already using Sycamore's SN 8000.

-- Marguerite Reardon, senior editor, Light Reading, http://www.lightreading.com