Alcatel-Lucent has agreed to acquire reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexer (ROADM) vendor Tropic Networks for an undisclosed sum, the companies announced today.

Alcatel-Lucent already has several products with ROADM functionality, such as the Lambda Extreme, the 1626, the 1696, the 1850 TSS and the Universal Packet Mux. The company will continue selling Tropic’s ROADM alongside all those, it said. The main thing it was after in acquiring Tropic was not its ROADM but rather Wavelength Tracker, the network management system that allows network operators to monitor and provision optical signals end-to-end across a mesh network. Alcatel-Lucent plans to lend that capability to all its ROADM-based gear.

“If you add wavelengths or take them out, [Wavelength Tracker] keeps track of what’s going on in the network and will automatically reconfigure them to optimize the network,” said Tom Goodwin, vice president of marketing and communications for Alcatel-Lucent's Optics business. “Other companies are looking at point-to-point-to-point type of technologies. They’ll reassign wavelengths within each link. We’re finding, when we get into bandwidth-hungry applications, with spikes in bandwidth, you run into potential scaling problems if you can’t keep track of wavelengths throughout the whole network. Providing the network with a holistic view, allowing it to self-optimize, saves provisioning time.”

In the future, ROADMs will become less like products and more like technology within products spanning long-haul, metro optical and hybrid packet aggregation networks, Goodwin said.

Alcatel and Tropic have been partners since they jointly pursued a deal to sell ROADMs to SBC Communications in 2004. The SBC deal was an early large-scale application of ROADMs, traditionally a long-haul technology, to metro networks. Rumors spread that the vendor duo, favored to win an SBC deal at one point, lost the business, but neither company has ever commented publicly on the matter. According to Alcatel-Lucent, Tropic has no Bell carrier customers today.

Alcatel took an equity stake in Tropic later that year, taking a board seat and leading a $33-million round that brought the start-up’s total funds to $120 million.

In 2005, as competing ROADM vendors such as Fujitsu Network Communications introduced a new generation of wavelength-selective switch (WSS)-enabled ROADMs, Tropic insisted WSS technology was not yet mature enough for commercial deployment.

By mid-2005, Ottawa-based Tropic had accumulated $153 million in funding and a $114-million deficit. In the fiscal year that ended in June 2005, the privately held firm saw $8 million in revenue ($2.5 million of which came from Alcatel) and a $32 million net loss. Five-year-old Tropic then restructured its finances, acquiring two Canadian energy firms in a move that brought it less than $10 million in cash—enough to last the company through late 2006, it predicted at the time.

Following the restructuring, Tropic, which had previously focused intently on the North American telco market, expanded its efforts to overseas markets and cable operators. In mid-2006, Tropic unveiled its own WSS-based ROADM.

Today Tropic’s customers are predominantly North American, Alcatel-Lucent said, though the latter plans to bring its technology to markets around the world. The two have worked together to try to penetrate the cable market but won’t say how much progress they’ve made so far. “We’re being cagey about that because, as we enter the MSO space, some fairly significant competitors would love to know what we’re up to,” Goodwin said.

The acquisition will also call into further question Alcatel-Lucent’s partnership with Adva Optical Networking. That partnership was originally formed as a reseller agreement between Lucent Technologies and ROADM vendor Movaz Networks, which was acquired by Adva last year. Adva’s management has anticipated that the partnership may not last. Today Goodwin said only, “That relationship continues.”