SuperComputing 2010 – Take the "Cable Challenge" to Win Some Finisar Swag!

Next week (November 15-18, 2010) Finisar will be attending SuperComputing 2010 in the birthplace of Jazz – the lively New Orleans, Louisiana. Now in its 23rd year – this year marks the first time it will be held in New Orleans – SC10 is the premier conference and exhibition for high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis.

Looking for things to do? While there will be a lot of activity at SC10, don’t forget to build some time into your schedule to stop by and say hello to us; visit our booth #4738 to hear about new trends and developments in active cable technology. We’ll be showing off a new product demonstration for the first time publicly, several times throughout the week, and we’ll also be hosting a “Cable Challenge” game. Come spin our prize wheel and test your knowledge of our Finisar cable products – everyone’s a winner!

If you’re walking the show floor and happen run into our Lady Laser, don’t be shy! Feel free to say hello and take a picture with her. She’s as friendly as they come.

Another booth to check out is the joint-hosted InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA) and OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) (booth #1161) for an update on HPC interconnects and open source software. In their Presentation Theater, Finisar will be presenting on Active Optical Cables for HPC Applications, Next Generation High-Bandwidth.

See you at the show! If you can’t make it out to the conference, send us a comment with your questions – would love to catch up.

Finisar Named Public Company of the Year

This week’s blog post comes from Tony Pearson, Finisar’s Senior Director of Product Marketing.

It seems that the honour and pleasure of writing blog posts for award ceremonies in cosmopolitan locations falls to me once again. This time I had the good fortune to join Mark Colyar, Finisar’s Sr. VP and GM of the Horsham PA site at Light Reading’s 6th Annual “Leading Lights” Awards dinner and ceremony in downtown Manhattan, New York City. I don’t need to comment on what an incredible venue Manhattan is, but I will say that it didn’t disappoint.

Finisar was nominated for one of several awards presented during the evening, specifically “Public Company of the Year”. Other nominees in this category included Apple and Cisco, so it was indeed an honour to not only be nominated but to win the award!

The evening was a well attended occasion with a broad mix of representatives from multiple walks of the high-tech world. There were representatives from software and hardware companies as well as carriers and IDC’s. The event began with a cocktail reception in the lavishly appointed (if perhaps a little overly decorated in a style somewhat reminiscent of a 70’s high-end disco) bar/lounge area of Hudson Terrace on 46th Street in Manhattan, followed by a dinner and awards ceremony in the terrace dining area, presenting great views of one of the worlds “most viewed” skylines.

The Light Reading team provided both entertainment and accolades to their guests and even included a humorous twist on a “Hall of Shame” for some of the more infamous ‘contributors’ to the Communications Industry.

In keeping with the tone of the rest of the event, the evening closed with coffee, dessert, and cigars and another opportunity to meet a cross-section of the diverse group of attendees. The Light Reading team would certainly receive my vote for “most excellent host of the year” were there such a category. In all, the event was both personally a pleasurable experience – good food, good wine, great location and good company (pun intended), coupled with the honour of winning the last award of the evening, somewhat akin to “Best Movie” at the other annual award ceremony of note.

On hand to receive Finisar’s award for Public Company of the Year were (left to right) Mark Colyar, Senior VP and GM of Horsham and Tony Pearson, Senior Director of Product Marketing.

Video: Finisar WaveShaper 100S and Application Suite Demo at ECOC 2010

Optical Components: Reasons to be cheerful

Guest blog by Pauline Rigby, editor of Opticalreflection.com

I set out for the European Conference in Optical Communications (ECOC) in Turin this month with an open mind. The amount of data in the digital universe may be growing at a phenomenal rate, but are the fortunes of optical components vendors on a corresponding upwards cycle?

I was pleasantly surprised to find a very positive vibe on the show floor. Industry consolidation, oversupply and commodity products are no longer the main topics for discussion. Instead vendors are talking about how to differentiate their offerings, and some are even complaining that they can’t keep up with demand. There are several names that could fit the bill here, but since this is a Finisar blog, I’ll talk about Finisar. [Ed note: good idea!]

Just a few weeks prior to the show, Finisar announced Flexgrid technology for its wavelength selective switches (WSS), which allows telecoms carriers to define wavelengths that don’t conform to the ITU grid. Flexible channel spacing will probably be needed to accommodate future bit rates such as 400 Gbps or even 1 Tbps, which will occupy a non-standard amount of space. For instance, a 400 Gbps channel might take up 75 GHz of bandwidth, while 1 Tbps could occupy 150 GHz.

Verizon executives explained at ECOC how they will need this flexibility in order to ensure their networks are ready for 1Tbps upgrades, which are likely to be needed during the working lifetime of WDM equipment being designed today. Finisar’s WSS technology, which is based on that found inside digital projectors, has an advantage because it can easily be programmed to accommodate different channel spacings – it’s simply a software change.

The cold, hard data suggest that the components industry is on an uptick. In the couple of weeks since the show there have been no fewer than three positive market forecasts from research firms, including iSuppli, LightCounting and Infonetics, but my favourite data point comes from Andrew Schmitt, directing analyst for optical at Infonetics Research, who spoke at the ECOC Symposium on 100GbE.

The market for optical hardware is pretty substantial, and currently worth £13 billion annually, according to Infonetics. The spending patterns in this market are shifting away from legacy Sonet/SDH hardware and towards WDM equipment. Right now the balance is about 50:50, but by 2014 the market will be roughly 70% WDM equipment.

“This is very good news for components vendors because the bill of materials [for optical components] is much higher in WDM systems,” Schmitt pointed out. “While the overall [optical hardware] market is growing at around 5% annually, if you’re making components your market is growing at closer to 10%.”

Pauline Rigby is editor of the blog Opticalreflection.com

Sensors Expo Wrap-Up

This week’s Lightspeed post comes from guest blogger Pritha Khurana, Components Product Line Manager for Finisar.

The last few weeks have been very busy for Finisar. Spread across the world, our team participated in both the ISC and Sensors Expo conferences. I flew to Chicago to spend June 7 through June 9 at the annual Sensor event, co-located with the Embedded Systems Conference (ESC). I love the opportunity to reconnect face-to-face with our customers and partners, discuss fiber optic communication advances in the enterprise with our industry colleagues, and of course the chance to meet potential customers. At this event, Finisar showcased its VCSEL technology – used for precision optical sensor applications – at the company’s booth. Finisar’s demonstration of precision velocity sensing using VCSELs for a completely non-contact system drew a lot of interest. A number of customers expressed an interest in turbidity sensing using lasers as well.

I spent two solid days meeting with customers and partners at this year’s Sensors conference, which drew more attendees than last year. The sensors industry, a space Finisar is engaged in through its VCSEL products has widely embraced the areas of MEMs-Based Systems, Energy Harvesting, Smart Power, Data Acquisition, Wireless Networking, and more.

While a busy couple of weeks for Finisar, the time with our customers, partners and industry peers discussing “what’s next”, and discovering how Finisar is an important facet of these next steps was as valuable as ever.