Wednesday Bytes: Ciena, Colt, Sparkle, Megaport, VAST, Flexential, Astound, AXON

Four bits of partnership news and one M&A.

Ciena and Colt have teamed up again, this time for a quantum-safe transtatlantic transmission. The trial ran on 6900km of Colt’s subsea fiber network between New York and London using Ciena’s WL6e encryption service, which supports up to 1.6T with PQC algorithms. They securely transmitted at 800GbE, which is the next level up from the more ubiquitous 100GbE and 400GbE on subsea systems right now.

Sparkle and Xebia are have announced a partnership targeting the R&E community. The two will combine Sparkle’s cloud connectivity and Xebia’s cloud AI expertise to help institutions with cloud transformation initiatives. The deal focuses on Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

Megaport has tapped VAST Data to support its next phase of technological development. Megaport will be using Vast’s AI Operating System to build the foundation for its bare-metal compute, GPU infrastructure, adn distributed AI services. The deal follows Megaport’s acquisition of Latitude.sh and comes as the company is transforming its platform into a broader cloud services portfolio.

Flexential and Astound Business Solutions are celebrating 10 years as partners up in the Pacific Northwest. The two now manage a 3,456-count dark fiber ring in and around the data center complexes of Hillsboro and Portland, Oregon. The original build was for 864-count, which seemed like a lot at the time but is table-stakes these days and has obviously been scaled up to match.

And AXON Networks has made an inorganic move in the vendor space. They have acquired Greenerwave Systems, which specializes in software-defined connectivity and NaaS orchestration. AXON will integrate those capabilities into its own portfolio, creating a unified architecture and platform.

If you haven't already, please take our Reader Survey! Just 3 questions to help us better understand who is reading Telecom Ramblings so we can serve you better!