How Infinera Turned Thinking about Optics on its Head

A Q&A with Jagdeep Singh

Infinera Corp. may be the most interesting company in the optics space today. The company, which began shipping product in late 2004, now is ranked No. 1 in revenue shipments in the multireach DWDM segment in North America, according to Ovum RHK, which last fall said Infinera owned 27 percent of that market segment with shipments of $194 million in the four quarters through Q2 2007.

Infinera was able to capture that impressive chunk of marketshare – and have a successful IPO during a down market – by going left when other companies went right. That “contrarian” posture, as Infinera CEO and co-founder Jagdeep Singh puts it, has paid off nicely for the little Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company and the many service providers that use its optical gear.

With 41 customers as of this spring, Infinera counts Cox Communications Inc., FPL Fibernet, Level 3 Communications, Global Crossing and XO Communications among its customers. The company also provides gear to important Internet content players, which it declined to name, and at least one RBOC.

Paula Bernier, xchange Editor in Chief, recently spoke with Singh, who is a keynote speaker at June’s NXTcomm show in Las Vegas, about Infinera and trends in the optics space at large.

For those not familiar with Infinera, what does the company do?
Singh: “We are an optical telecom systems equipment company, so we make systems that we sell to telecom carriers that own fiber optic plant. But the unique thing about us is that we’re vertically integrated, so even though we sell systems to carriers, we actually make our own components in our own fabrication facility here in Sunnyvale.

“So we own the semiconductor fab. We design and manufacture the world’s first large-scale photonic integrated circuits, which are the source of our fundamental economic advantage and reliability.”

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