Turin Networks Acquires Products, Assets of White Rock Networks

Turin Networks Inc. today announced it has acquired the product portfolio and the majority of the material assets of optical gear vendor White Rock Networks, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and closed its doors Aug. 31.

Turin placed the winning bid in an auction proceeding earlier this month. The bid was north of $3 million, according to reports in the Dallas Business Journal. White Rock’s operations in China were not included in the sale.

The transaction expands Turin Networks’ product portfolio and carrier customer base to more than 300 customers worldwide, the company said.

Turin Networks’ spokesman Kevin Wade said White Rock had about 120 customers while Turin had nearly 200; only a handful of accounts overlap since the companies were competitors. Both targeted the same customers – ILECs, IOCs, CLECs and some cable and wireless operators, he added.

Wade said while the two companies were “fighting it out” in the marketplace, their respective products are complementary. “When you look at our flagship products – our Traverse platform and their VLX 2020 – at first glance, it looks like a lot of overlap. There certainly is some, but if you look at what their product is good at and what our product is good at, they actually are more complementary than competitive.”

He explained that White Rock focused on being a cost-effective platform for high-density SONET and Ethernet access aggregation while Traverse was focused on multiservice support, such as Ethernet switching , digital cross-connect and high-capacity optical circuits.

White Rock Networks’ product portfolio consists of the VLX 2020 Optical Transport System, the VLX 2006 Multiservice Access Platform, the VLX 300 and 400 Service Edge Concentrators and the VLXpert EMS. 

Turin Networks existing products include the Traverse Multiservice Transport Switch family, the TraversEdge line of multiservice edge aggregation products, the TransAccess family of TDM aggregation products and the TransNav Management System.

“We are going to continue to sell and support them and integrate the two product lines in as much as that is possible,” Wade said.

To that end, Turin has hired about 25 White Rock employees with expertise in R&D, tech support, operations and engineering, Wade said. No executive management will be joining the Turin team, he added.

The former White Rock staff will remain in Dallas in the existing White Rock offices for the time being, said Wade. Turin, which is based in Petaluma, Calif., also has an office in Dallas housing sales executives and sales engineers. The two offices are likely to be combined, but the final location in undetermined.

Turin Networks Inc. www.turinnetworks.com

Share this article: Email, Slashdot, Digg, Del.icio.us, Yahoo!MyWeb, Windows Live Favorites, Furl
Add this article feed to: RSS, My Yahoo, Newsgator, Bloglines

Read Comments [1]