Optical Components

Coverage

Ovum RHK's Optical Components program is primarily focused on identifying profitable opportunities for optical component suppliers. While the market is stabilizing and experiencing top-line growth the industry is still plagued by overcapacity and most optical component vendors are experiencing negative operating margins. Ovum RHK's research identifies network architecture transitions that present opportunities to optical component vendors and analyzes the competitive landscape for strategic development of sales and marketing.

MARKET COVERAGE

Ovum RHK addresses the following key business issues:

• Datacom: What is the status of IT spending? What network evolutions are in LAN and their impact on optical components? What network evolutions exist in SAN? When will iSCSI take off? Who will dominant the storage and enterprise switching markets? Who are the emerging players, what are their products? How likely are they to succeed?
• Wide area networks: What architectural changes are occurring in carrier networks? Which optical components are affected by the architectural changes? What technologies are system vendors selecting to support carrier architectural changes? Which emerging technologies can disrupt the market? How will demand for storage, video, wavelength services, gaming, and VoIP affect the network architecture and the optical components?
• Access: How will the growth of PON in Asia affect optical components? When will PON emerge in NA? Which components will be selected? Has CATV completed its backbone transition to support VoD? What are the new architectures? Are there opportunities for optical component suppliers in CATV?

SIGNIFICANT TRENDS

Ovum RHK addresses the following key network architecture issues:

• Broadband Access: Which system vendors will win the U.S. RBOC business and which will prevail in Asia? When will FTTx take off and in what form? Will PON migrate from A/BPON to G/EPON?
• New services: How will carriers support growing demands for LAN and SAN transport? Will enterprises buy transport for virtualization and remote storage from carriers? How will this change in market dynamics affect component suppliers?
• Enterprise technology: What will trigger the transition from 1 to 10 Gigabit Ethernet? How far can copper go? How will it affect deployment?
• WAN evolution: What optical component opportunity emerges from carriers adding intelligence to the network edge? What technologies will system vendors adopt for each phase of carrier's planned architectural transformations? Which optical components will be required? When?

OPTICAL COMPONENT STRATEGIES

Ovum RHK addresses the following key component business issues:

• Consolidation: What events will precipitate the next round of mergers and acquisition? Who is most susceptible to acquisition?
• China: What pricing is coming from Chinese optical component manufacturers? What level of acceptance are Chinese suppliers experiencing outside of China? What level of success are U.S. suppliers experiencing inside China? Which component vendors have not relocated to China?
• Subsystems market: How big is the subsystem market? Which products are being accepted as subsystems? Which system vendors are purchasing subsystems? What are the effective strategies to keep margins for subsystem sales?

ANALYST TEAM

Daryl Inniss: Program Director, Communications Semiconductors

Daryl Inniss is Program Director for the Optical Components program. He has 15 years of optoelectronics experience. He is responsible for worldwide coverage of pump lasers; erbium, Raman and semiconductor optical amplifiers; dispersion compensators; dynamic gain equalizers; reconfigurable and fixed optical add/drop subsystems; and switch matrices. Dr. Inniss is currently researching the SAN and LAN markets. Before joining Ovum RHK, Daryl worked for JDS Uniphase as Technical Manager for Raman Amplifier Development. Previously, he spent eleven years at Bell Laboratories/Lucent, conducting research on optical fibers, fiber lasers, and high-power fiber amplifiers. Daryl was awarded a Ph.D. in Chemistry from UCLA, and an AB in Chemistry from Princeton University.

Karen Liu: Director, Components

Karen Liu has 20 years of experience in optical networking, including the design and marketing of components and optical networking systems. She brings expertise in optical systems architecture, transmission technology, optical network modeling, optical components technology, and the introduction of new technology into products and networks. Prior to joining Ovum RHK, Karen worked for Tellabs as a senior product planner, with responsibility for optical architecture and product definition of a metropolitan DWDM product. Before Tellabs, Karen was a research staff member at the IBM Research Division, responsible for the optical design of one of the earliest commercial DWDM system products. Karen received a Ph.D. in applied physics from Stanford University and a B.S.E. in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University.