ADC and Overture Networks announced an original equipment manufacturer agreement today wherein ADC will immediately begin selling Overture’s ISG family of Ethernet access and transport gear worldwide, branded as the Loopstar 700 line.

The deal lends a much larger global footprint to Overture, a five-year-old start-up with about 35 employees and 50 customers. (ADC has about 8200 employees worldwide.) It also introduces Overture to vertical markets it hadn’t before penetrated, such as the wireless space, where ADC has about 20 large carrier customers.

ADC gets a line of products to address carriers’ need to transport Ethernet traffic over legacy circuit-based infrastructure and vice versa. The Overture gear complements ADC’s existing multiservice Sonet access and transport products, the Loopstar 800 and 1600, which it obtained through a 2004 OEM agreement with Huawei Technologies. While the 800 and 1600 handle legacy Sonet and Ethernet like the Overture line, the Overture gear uses packet traffic natively, using its own pseudowire technology, rather than sending packets over Sonet.

ADC, which has its eye on low-end business services--a few DS-1s at a time, with the occasional DS-3--wanted equipment that could help customers migrate from legacy to Ethernet architectures but not a large aggregation box. The company chose Overture in large part because of the breadth of its portfolio; some products can handle four T-1s, some can handle four Gigabit Ethernet links. ADC also liked the fact that Overture hadn’t sold much in overseas markets, where ADC has a strong presence. And of course, ADC liked Overture’s technology.

“We wanted a leader in pseudowire technology,” said Mark McDonald, vice president of marketing and product line management for ADC’s Active Infrastructure division.

ADC plans to sell Overture’s gear largely to wireless carriers and cable operators. Telecom carriers are third on that list, McDonald said, since they are likely to make a slower migration to Ethernet.

About a year ago, Overture formed an OEM agreement with Tellabs, which sells Overture’s ISG product line branded as its own 8815 family of multiservice access nodes. Overture also has an OEM agreement with Movaz Networks, and Juniper Networks and NEC both recommend the gear to customers.

Neither ADC nor Overture expects Tellabs and ADC to compete directly against each other with the Overture gear, however.

“Tellabs is probably more focused on the higher end of the scale,” said Chip Reddin, Overture’s vice president of marketing and product management. “ADC is very much focused on a network infrastructure play--multiservice transmission systems, loop extender systems, broadband systems and so forth. They can get us into the DSL space, which is something we don’t currently offer.”

Separately yesterday, ADC announced its participation in the Ethernet Alliance, a group of equipment vendors and other firms committed to promoting Ethernet technology.