Breakthrough for World Wide Packets
In what its top executive called the company’s biggest and most important sale ever, Spokane Valley-based World Wide Packets announced Thursday it will sell technology to KPN, a Dutch telecommunications company that’s investing millions of dollars to upgrade its network.
The sale is the first benefit of a newly announced global partnership between World Wide Packets and Lucent Technologies, Inc., said World Wide Packets CEO Dave Curry.
Lucent announced Thursday it will be a worldwide reseller of World Wide Packet’s Lightning Edge equipment and services.
Terms of the deal between Lucent and KPN, and the resulting revenue for World Wide Packets, were not disclosed.
Curry said the deal means “tens of thousands” of the company’s fiber-optic Lightning Edge components will be bought by KPN to serve business and enterprise customers in Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium.
“This will be by far the largest deployment with any customer to date,” said Curry. “The scale is so substantial that it dwarfs anything else we’ve done.”
The announcement is a ringing validation of World Wide Packets’ products, added Curry, who joined the company in 2001. He became CEO in 2002 after founder Bernard Daines left for another job in Utah. Daines started World Wide Packets in 2000.
The company has about 90 workers at its Spokane Valley office; Curry said the impact on staffing from the KPN sale will not be significant.
Thursday’s announcements underscore a turnaround in the telecommunications sector, said Curry. World Wide Packets and other telecoms endured a prolonged industry slump from 2001 to 2003.
He said the potential for more large contracts will increase, with French telecom giant Alcatel SA’s announced acquisition of Lucent for $13.4 billion.
If that merger is approved, the resulting company would become a huge telecommunications equipment provider with global customers and immense opportunities for World Wide Packets, said Curry.
On whether privately held and venture-capital backed World Wide Packets would be sold to the resulting giant, Curry declined to speculate.
“What might happen I’m not able to comment on. We will stay out of the way while elephants are mating,” he said.
If Alcatel-Lucent does buy World Wide Packets, it would be ironic for Daines. He founded World Wide Packets after selling his previous company, Packet Engines, to Alcatel in 1999.
World Wide Packets’ growth has been driven by an industry shift toward adoption of Ethernet — a way of sending data to and from computers across a network — for voice and data networks operated by Sprint Nextel Verizon and others.
Most companies have been using Ethernet internally for more than 25 years. But its use has now broadened and improved so that Ethernet on a much larger network can be as reliable as old-fashioned telephone service is, said Curry.
“This sale absolutely validates the fact the market for carrier Ethernet products is here,” Curry said.
KPN, with headquarters in The Hague, is the largest telecom carrier in the Netherlands. At one time it was a government utility; today it is a publicly traded, privately operated company.
It has nearly 7 million voice customers, 21 million mobile customers and more than 2 million Internet data customers. It announced last year plans to spend millions of dollars to upgrade its network for improved, data and television services.