Metro-Optix India gets $5 m for R&D

BANGALORE: US based Metro-Optix Inc has planned to increase its investment between three to five million dollars in its wholly owned subsidiary and research and development center in Bangalore, Metro-Optix India Private Limited. This includes the investment that the company has made in the center this year and 2003.

The company is also looking at raising its fourth round of venture funding of about $40 million out of which $20 million has already been assured by VCs. It had earlier raised close to $150 million in venture funding of three rounds in the past two years.

Metro-Optix, engaged in developing next generation optical networking equipment, started its Indian operations after it bought over Microland’s Net-Brahma for an undisclosed cash-stock transaction, early this year. "The Bangalore center is focussed on developing work on Internet Protocol (IP) based technologies and will continue to do that. While the center in the US builds the hardware product, the Indian center will build the software platform to run on the product. As and when the business needs arise we would expand the Indian center," remarked Metro-Optix, Chairman and CEO, David Orr.

Metro-Optix, CFO, Uday Bellary, said, "By acquiring Net Brahma’s engineering team and readily available infrastructure, Metro-Optix has been able to get a head start in building a world class R&D center in Bangalore. We are confident that this team will take total responsibility to drive all IP/MPLS/GMPLS related product features for CityStream to help the company gain a competitive position in the marketplace and achieve its business goals."

Metro-Optix’s flagship product CityStream, built with an investment of $90 million, has 11 customers already, with atleast 16 others testing the product and 38 prospective customers to follow. All the customers are based in America because the product has been developed in compliance with the North America standards. The company also plans to make the product compatible to international standards, but says would take in another $80 million, in investment. The Bangalore lab is developing CityView, Element Management System (EMS), which runs on CityStream.

"The product that we develop is basically to lower the cost/bit for traffic bandwidth management on a scalable metro performance. With the telecom industry showing signs of recovery, it is critical for Metro-Optix to build on its product features to maintain a competitive edge in the optical networking equipment market," added Orr.

"By working with various US equipment vendors and building protocol stacks in the areas of IP routing, MPLS, Voice over IP etc., the Indian engineering team had a proven track record in building leading edge networking software technologies. The team is very excited about evolving from a protocol software and services company to become a strategic R&D Center for Metro-Optix. Going forward, we would focus on emerging technologies like GMPLS, Optical UNI, MPLS, Routing extensions for the optical network, ATM PNNI etc. as well as build a comprehensive element management system to control distributed CityStream Network Elements in a complex network," said Metro-Optix India, Managing Director, Bhasker Sharma.