OpVista Riding Cable Bandwidth Surge

6/29/2006

Comment (0)

Tweet

Last fall, an OpVista excecutive with a sense of humor shared a cellphone-captured video of CEO Karl May in lederhosen, bouncing along to an oom-pah-pah beat at a company Oktoberfest bash. Now it seems that May has plenty of reasons to be dancing in the aisles.

In June, the company closed a $28 million series F funding round. May hopes "F" in this case stands for "final." He says the company is on track to reach profitability within a year. Better still, he says "getting close to $100 million in revenue is not impossible for 2007."

That's an eye-popping number for an optical startup making its bread primarily in the cable market. MSOs like Cox Communications and Time Warner Cable are gobbling up the company's OpVista2000 metro DWDM platform. And the icing on the cake is that MSOs are not just talking about ROADMs, but actually deploying them.

"We're seeing widespread adoption of ROADMs in the cable space," May says.

The cable demand is being driven by exploding bandwidth requirements on their metro networks from faster high-speed data services, video on demand (VOD), digital simulcast and HDTV.

"They are doubling traffic every six months," May notes. "It's a very steep growth curve... Soon we're going to have to support multiple 10-Gbit/s rings."

May says 90 percent of OpVista's revenue will come from the cable market this year. In 2007, that number is more likely to come in around 75 percent as OpVista starts picking up more telco business, particularly in Europe.