MCI this week awarded Movaz Networks a multi-year global purchase agreement to procure and deploy Movaz’s metro optical transport systems.
Terms of the agreement were not disclosed. Movaz says the non-exclusive deal is “significant” and one of its largest contracts with a North American service provider.
MCI began field deployment of the Movaz RAY product line in 2002 to carry a variety of traffic. RAY-based OC-48 and OC-192 optical rings are deployed in core and enterprise environments in six metropolitan areas in the U.S., says Dennis Day, MCI senior manager of transmission and network management equipment engineering.
For the enterprise, the RAY systems tie offices and buildings together in campus networks and support wavelength and Ethernet services, as well as FICON and ESCON storage-area network (SAN) applications, Day says. He said the Movaz equipment could be the foundation of managed wavelength SAN and Ethernet service offerings from MCI.
In the core, the systems are deployed as “cap and grow” consolidators of existing DWDM point-to-point links and SONET-based rings to reduce the amount of fiber and fiber leases in MCI’s networks, Day says. MCI’s incumbent DWDM and SONET vendors are Nortel, Alcatel and Fujitsu, he says.
The Movaz equipment will support MCI’s next generation core architecture, Day says, though he would not disclose details about that architecture. The carrier’s overall strategy, however, is to enable faster provisioning, reduce the number of truck rolls required for new service provisioning, and attain higher operational efficiency, he says.
Though young Movaz, which was founded in 2000, did not land MCI with the help of a “big brother” incumbent vendor partnership, analysts see that as an area where Movaz could broaden its penetration. The company has an alliance with Motorola but that’s targeted at the cable multisystem operator market.
“Many of Movaz’s competitors are Tier 1 vendors which have greater service and support capabilities than Movaz can yet muster on its own,” states Dave Dunphy, an analyst at Current Analysis, in a recent report. “Outside of the Motorola relationship in the MSO segment, Movaz does not yet have a major service and support partner of the same quality as its development partnerships.”
Movaz Chairman and CEO Bijan Khosravi says the company provides its own customer service and support, and can respond to a service call in four hours.
The RAY product line includes an integrated wavelength transport and switching system, optical add/drop muxes, and amplifiers. Software for the systems performs GMPLS signaling, automated path setup and reconfiguration.
Movaz has 43 customers worldwide with “hundreds” of RAY systems installed across the telecom, cable, enterprise and government markets.
Privately held Movaz has been taking revenue for two years, Khosravi says. Last year, the company recorded revenue of $36.5 million and booked $50 million in business, he says.
Movaz was founded in 2000.
