At the NXTcomm trade show in Chicago last week, Adva Optical Networking’s Chief Executive Officer Brian Protiva vowed to be nimbler and more cost-competitive than rival vendors with versatile multiservice transport platforms (MSTPs) aimed at metro networks.

“We don’t necessarily believe in God boxes,” Protiva said in an interview, referring to some of those MSTPs.

Throughout the past year, equipment vendors have introduced several such platforms, designed to help carriers migrate at their own pace from legacy time-division technologies to packet-based ones such as Ethernet. The large switch fabrics typically included in those platforms, which allow carriers to dictate their own mix of legacy and next-generation traffic, are expensive, Protiva said, giving Adva a cost advantage.

MSTP vendors such as Alcatel-Lucent, Fujitsu Network Communications and Nortel Networks have added wavelength-division multiplexer (WDM) functions to their MSTPs. But such moves won’t eclipse the demand for stand-alone WDM gear, Protiva said. For example, while Fujitsu (a partner of Adva’s) has included WDM capabilities in its new Flashwave 9500 Packet Optical Networking platform, it also offers a stand-alone reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexer (ROADM), the Flashwave 7500. “There’s always a market for best-of-breed WDM,” he said.

In addition to making network planning and provisioning as simple as possible, Protiva said, “Our focus will be to drive the cost out of ROADM.”

Having established itself in the access and metro optical markets, Adva hopes to gain market share in two primary directions: in the optical core and, perhaps more immediately, in the market for packet-based optical networking in the metro. But unlike vendors hoping to penetrate the metro by leveraging their presence in the Ethernet access space, Adva is hoping to move diagonally, Protiva said, leveraging its presence in the optical access space to gain share in the next-gen metro.

“We’ll try to move much faster than the big guys, responding to customers quickly,” he said.