Len Bosack is at it again.

The man who co-founded Cisco Systems this week unveiled another product that he believes could transform the way companies do business, much the way Cisco routers did.

His 16-year-old company, XKL LLC, developed the DXM optical transport system, a 1-rack unit device supporting up to 100Gbps that enables enterprises with access to dark fiber to construct their own point-to-point metro-area optical link.

DXM is intended to alleviate the need for large enterprises with thousands of computers to resort to costly and limited options for interconnecting those systems optically through a campus environment or metropolitan area. Typically, these companies must purchase a lit service from a carrier, or light fiber with equipment from traditional telecom vendors or start-ups that can be expensive, difficult to operate or deploy, or have minimal management and protection capabilities.

DXM provides per channel path protection under 1 millisecond, XKL claims. It also can be monitored and reconfigured remotely through a familiar command line interface (CLI) – a Cisco router-like CLI.

That means a company need not hire an optical engineer or nail themselves to any service contracts to deploy the product, XKL says.

“It’s a Cisco CLI-like management interface, which is very different from the typical optical interface, which is TL1-based,” says Eve Griliches, an analyst at IDC. “That essentially allows the millions of (Cisco Certified Network Engineers) to operate a box like this almost immediately.”

It also dramatically drops the price of moving a bit of information. Bosack claims 1 million of those bits – or 1Mbps – costs 10 cents with DXM vs. $400 per Mbps per month from a carrier’s DS-3 service.

“It’s not uncommon to see the cost per bit per second (go) down by a factor of 100, or even 500, or actually a factor of 1,000,” Bosack says. “Conventional wisdom is, when you change the price or quantity of something by a factor of 10, it’s not just the same thing anymore, it becomes a kind of different quality. And when you do it by a factor of 100 or more, it’s an even more dramatic change.”

To date, no enterprises are trialing the product but a couple of ISPs are. Wilshire Connection in downtown Los Angeles is running a mix of TDM, SONET and Ethernet traffic through the DXMs to increase the efficiency of leased fiber links and provide metro lit services.