INFN Company Profile

Infinera Corporation is a leader in optical transport networking solutions, providing equipment, software and services to telecommunications service providers, internet content providers (“ICPs”), cable providers, wholesale and enterprise carriers, research and education institutions, enterprise customers, and government entities across the globe. Optical transport networks are deployed by customers facing significant demand for optical bandwidth prompted by increased use of high-speed internet access, business Ethernet services, mobile broadband, cloud-based services, high-definition video streaming services, virtual and augmented reality, and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Our optical transport systems are highly scalable, flexible and open, built using a combination of internally manufactured and third-party components. Technologically, a key element of our systems are optical engines, which comprise large-scale photonic integrated circuits (“PICs”) and digital signal processors (“DSPs”). We optimize the manufacturing process by using indium phosphide to build our PICs, which enables the integration of a large amount of optical functions onto a set of semiconductor chips. This large-scale integration of our PICs and advanced DSPs allow us to deliver on the features that customers care about the most, including cost per bit, power and space. In addition, our optical engines are designed to increase the capacity and reach performance of our products by leveraging coherent optical transmission.

Over the past few years, we have significantly increased the number of products we offer, evolving from focusing entirely on the long-haul and subsea markets to offering a more complete suite of solutions that span the long-haul, subsea, DCI and metro markets. In late 2014, we expanded our addressable market by introducing the Cloud Xpress platform for the DCI market to meet a growing need for metro-reach optical interconnections between data centers. We introduced the Cloud Xpress 2 in mid-2017, which further optimizes capacity, space and power, all key elements our ICP customers value.

In the second half of 2015, we entered the metro market with the acquisition of Transmode AB (“Transmode”), a leader in metro packet-optical applications, based in Stockholm, Sweden. Entering into the metro market expanded our addressable market and enabled us to offer a more complete portfolio of solutions, particularly to existing long-haul customers that also build metro networks. We have expanded our suite of metro solutions by both enhancing our XTM Series platforms and also utilizing our optical engines to deliver Cloud Xpress, XT and XTC Series platforms.

Our optical portfolio is designed to be managed by a single network management system. We also provide capabilities to enable programmability of our Intelligent Transport Networks with our technologies, such as Instant Bandwidth, which when combined with our differentiated hardware solutions, enable customers to turn on bandwidth as needed by activating a software license. Additionally, our Xceed Software Suite is a multi-layer management and control platform that simplifies customer operations and enables customers to leverage the scalability, flexibility and openness of our Intelligent Transport Networks to deliver services while efficiently using their network resources.

We believe our portfolio of solutions benefits our customers by providing a unique combination of highly scalable capacity and features that address various applications and ultimately simplify and automate optical network operations.

Optical transport networking equipment carries digital information using light waves over fiber optic cables. With the advent of wavelength division multiplexing (“WDM”) systems, data is transmitted by using multiple wavelengths of light using different frequencies or colors over a single optical fiber. Customers deploy WDM systems to carry information between continents, across countries, between cities and within metropolitan areas, and in some cases all the way to the end-user. Fiber optic networks are generally capable of carrying most types of communications traffic. We believe that a number of trends in the communications industry are driving demand for large amounts of network bandwidth and ultimately will increase demand for optical transport networking systems. These trends include:

growth of cloud services;

growth of bandwidth-intensive services like streaming high-definition video services;

increasing use of connected virtual and augmented reality devices;

proliferation of mobile services of Wi-Fi, 4G and future growth of 5G; and

rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), driving massive growth in the number of network-connected devices.
As network traffic grows, customers add transmission bandwidth to existing optical networks or deploy new systems to address bandwidth demands and offer expanded services to end-users. In particular, consumers and businesses increasingly rely on the cloud for their application needs across compute, storage and network functions. As cloud adoption increases, large network operators are experiencing a magnification effect on incoming traffic, such that a single request from an end-user can generate many times the amount of traffic between data centers as compared to the amount of traffic generated by the original request.

We believe we are in the midst of a shift in network architectures distinguished between addressing massive growth of server-to-server traffic between data centers and public internet user-to-data traffic as deployed by traditional service providers. To manage server-to-server traffic growth, our customers seek high capacity, scalable, disaggregated solutions designed to accommodate point-to-point traffic patterns. Infrastructure to address this demand is focused on minimizing power and space and being cost-optimized. In contrast, traditional service providers require high capacity solutions with more flexibility in their integrated network platforms to aggregate dataflows and add and drop traffic at various points across their networks. These customers require protection schemes and a larger variety of interfaces to address their end customer needs. Our solutions serve both the point-to-point applications driven by increasing data center traffic and the more traditional mesh-oriented switched transport networks.