Matisse Networks exited stealth mode today, threatening to turn the optical equipment industry on its ear with its optical burst switching (OBS) technology.

A sort of collusion between optical circuit switching and optical packet switching, OBS operates at the subwavelength level, quickly setting up and tearing down lightpaths to accommodate bursts of traffic. Incoming traffic is aggregated according to various parameters, such as destination or quality-of-service level. This approach makes more efficient use of bandwidth than circuit switching, which reserves big-bandwidth lightpaths that often go unused. And it creates flexible mesh networks that Matisse argues can comfortably scale beyond 10 Gb/s, while Ethernet metro aggregation networks cannot.

Matisse got its first funding three years ago and now has $21 million, 45 U.S. employees and another 20 in India. The company is led by Sam Mathan, the former chief executive officer of Amber Networks.

The start-up is now beta testing three products that work together in metro aggregation networks to form its Etherburst Optical Switching platform: the PX 1000 photonic node--which switches at the photonic layer and is not packet-aware, the SX 1000 Ethernet service node--which interfaces with the rest of the network and maps Ethernet traffic into optical packets of varying wavelengths, and the MatisseView management system.

“In existing products, each transponder--the equivalent of [the SX 1000’s transport access point]--can only send to one destination,” said Timon Sloane, Matisse’s vice president of marketing. “With Matisse, a single transponder can send to every other transponder.”

Reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers (ROADMs) allow carriers to adjust these circuits remotely, Sloane admits, but as those adjustments are still made by a human, they’re not dynamic. Matisse’s system can retune itself in 50 nanoseconds or less, he said, which will have s direct impact on the ROADM space.

Matisse’s goal of bringing optical and packet technologies closer together is the same one that led Cisco Systems to introduce its IP-over-dense-wavelength-division-multiplexing gear. “Cisco’s approach has been to move tunable transponders into routers and switches to minimize the overall cost, but they’re still using transponders to set up circuits between routers,” Sloane said.

The SX-1000 starts at $86,000, and the PX-1000 starts at $58,000. Both will be generally available sometime in the fourth quarter.