Our products typically have a long sales cycle, requiring discussions with
prospective customers in order to better understand their network and system
level requirements and technology roadmaps. Our customers are predominantly
network equipment manufacturers, network operators and cloud service providers
and we have discussions with them regarding the requirements of their end customers,
which provides our sales force with insight into how our products will be integrated
into our customers’ solutions and how these systems will be deployed in
the networks of their end customers. This sales process requires us to develop
strong customer relationships. The period of time from our initial contact with
a prospective or current customer to the receipt of an actual purchase order
is frequently a year or more. Prospective customers perform system and network
level testing before equipment is deployed in a network carrying live traffic.
Customers require us to perform extensive reliability and verification testing
based on industry standards. This phase of our sales cycle can take several
months and purchase arrangements may not be entered into until after this phase
is completed. In addition, once the first purchase order is placed by a customer,
it may take several months or longer for that customer to increase the volume
of its purchases.
We invest time and resources to meet with leading carriers and cloud service
providers to understand network system performance issues. These efforts provide
us with a deep understanding of the challenges faced by carriers and cloud service
providers which, in turn, enables us to focus our future product and technology
development efforts to address those challenges. For example, understanding
that several of our customers are planning to adopt technologies that enable
up to 1,000 Gbps and higher transmission speeds, we are currently developing
products to satisfy these requirements.
Our in-house sales personnel also assist customers with orders, delivery requirements,
and warranty returns. Our technical support engineers respond to technical and
product-related questions, provide simulation tools to enable customers to optimize
their optical link design, and provide application support to customers who
have incorporated our products into their systems. In general, we have centralized
our technical support operations at our corporate headquarters in Maynard, Massachusetts.
Our centralized customer support operations allow our technical customer support
personnel to work directly with our research and development and operations
personnel on first-line as well as escalated specialized technical support,
which reduces the time it takes to identify and address our customers’
issues and helps our personnel maintain and improve upon their technical skills.
We also provide first line technical support to our international customers
on-site from our offices in California, China and Germany.
ADVA Optical Networking North America, Inc. accounted for 15%, of our revenue,
and ZTE Kangxun Telecom Co. Ltd., or ZTE, accounted for 30%, of our revenue,
Coriant, Inc. accounted for 11%.
