Telecommunications Magazine picked up Polaris Networks as one of the "hot start-up for 2002" in its June issue. It reported, Ping-Pong is the company-wide sport; sadly, the San Jose, California start-up's co-founders, Ray Kao, CEO and CTO, and Vu Nguyen, president and vice president of engineering, didn't quite make it to the company's recent semifinals. That, however, was play. Polaris is business. Commented the Magazine, the company has an ambitious, long-term roadmap for its OMX platform, but the immediate challenge for the product's first release will be tough enough. The OMX is intended to be more than just a DCS/ADM. Its architecture will enable it to evolve into a multi-service switch for ATM, IP and GigE. Yet a further evolution, which currently is only on paper, would add an optical cross-connect capability to the OMX.the expectation is that Polaris will be able to make a customer announcement when it launches its platform late this summer.
Polaris Networks develops new generation optical transport switching systems for metro core networks. Its systems combine optical transport (ADM) with the functions of a Wideband, Broadband and Super-broadband Digital Cross-connect Systems (DCS) managed via a GMPLS-based common control plane. Polaris was founded in June 2000 and is staffed by an accomplished team from Alcatel, Cisco, Fujitsu, Nortel, Siemens, Tellabs, AT&T and WorldCom. The company is funded by Redpoint Ventures, Venrock Associates, SToRM Ventures, Advanced Technology Ventures (ATV), and strategic private investors.