Active Insight

There was a new cult this year at OFC, the ‘Cult of Open.’ It formed from rising sentiment that the lack of interoperability of vendors in optical networks is a major…

400G Coherent and Beyond
Ciena had a blockbuster announcement at OFC 2017, but there was plenty of other interesting news to feast on. Cignal AI’s key takeaways concerning coherent…

100G and the Road to 400G

The transition to 100G network speeds inside the data center is underway at every major hyperscale operator simultaneously, creating major industry bottlenecks. Despite QSFP28…

Andrew Schmitt provided key OFC 2017 takeaways during an investor call hosted by Troy Jensen of Piper Jaffray.

This past October, Ciena announced its new coherent DSP, dubbed Wavelogic Ai. Ciena used the announcement to convey its coherent 100G+ roadmap and support for 400G. Ciena also hinted at important changes…

Intel’s financial results provide useful insight into the economic activities of the Cloud and Colo market. Effectively all of the CPUs (and now FPGAs) used in data centers come from…

Andrew Schmitt gave an update on the optical equipment and component market during an investor call hosted by Troy Jensen of Piper Jaffray on Tuesday, October 4. Sixty-eight investors participated….

Andrew Schmitt presented at the ECOC (European Conference for Optical Communications) in Dusseldorf, Germany during the week of Sept. 19. No time was wasted during the trip as Andrew fit…

Andrew Schmitt has returned from a week of meetings in Europe including three days at the European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC). He spoke to a capacity crowd at the…

Acacia is scheduled to report earnings on August 11th, and this will be the company’s first quarterly report since completing its recent IPO. In April 2016, Cignal AI examined Acacia’s…

Andrew presented the keynote presentation to kick off Next Gen Optical Networking in Nice, France on June 29th. His presentation was titled “Making Technology Decisions in a Challenging Environment”, and…

Andrew Schmitt created some excitement when he spoke about optical component and equipment market trends on a Piper Jaffray investor call on April 22. 83 investor clients were on the…

Andrew presented “Metro DCI – What’s Next?” at the annual OSA Executive Forum before OFC 2016. His slides focused on the evolution of metro DCI and highlighted the opportunity for…

Component and equipment vendors outlined the investments they are making in anticipation of some service providers adopting open line systems or fully dis-aggregated optical systems. This is a contentious technology…

The optical networking world finally gets a close up view of Acacia’s performance as the company is filing for an IPO. The most recent S-1/A filing by Acacia includes 2015 financial details, which we review through the lenses of Cignal AI’s customer and market knowledge in order to create a fine-grained view of the company’s performance and qualitative outlook. This analysis includes a detailed projection of customer composition for 90%+ of revenue, market share within entire 100G market, and estimates of ASPs beyond what is included in public documents.

The optical component industry is changing from one in which existing InP and discrete designs are replicated in SiPho to a new approach under which the unique benefits of SiPho…

The US Commerce department just dropped a bomb on ZTE, requiring all US companies to obtain an export license if they wish to do business with the company. Article updated…

OFC is just a few short weeks away now, and some key themes are coming into focus for the conference. Registered users may read this article, no subscription required.Continue…

Lumentum is the second largest optical component supplier and like Finisar, a bellwether of demand for both telecom and datacom equipment. We look at why their ROADM business is ramping…

Virtually all of the CPUs used in data centers come from Intel, therefore the Data Center group sales are a useful macro barometer for the growth and outlook of data…