Lumina Networks shuts down

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Lumina Networks has begun an orderly shut-down of business.

We set out as Lumina Networks in 2017, to bring open source SDN into large scale telco deployments – a mission we have in fact accomplished in more than half a dozen global-scale networks. In the process, most network vendors came to understand that selling their products into carriers would mean working with open source and adapted their products accordingly.

Unfortunately, while many in the telco community applauded our work, and planned deployments, revenue has not followed at the scale required for us to operate and manage a large open source project.

Essentially, revenue continued to flow to proprietary vendors. The switch to open source did not take place at a pace anywhere close to the speed that would enable us to operate and grow our business, despite commitments from many to the contrary. We have also found that COVID-19 has actually redirected funds away from automation projects and into building-out raw infrastructure, further delaying adoption.

While startups chasing consumer or enterprise markets are typically funded by the VC community, few to no telco-focused startups receive funding from such sources, making our reliance on revenue even more critical.

Selling Lumina to a proprietary vendor who is naturally antithetical to our mission proved an impossible task and for this reason we must now close our business.

The team we built at Lumina Networks is world-class and I know that many of them will want to continue their work in the open source community, in SDN and in virtualization.

Fortunately, much of their work at Lumina will live on in open source through the OpenDaylight and the associated projects we have helped shape. Ironically, one of the benefits of open source we promoted – that it would survive us – has turned out prophetic.

Lumina Networks