BTI Systems: We owned 2014

Optical transport systems provider BTI Systems says it set a revenue record in 2014. The privately held firm did not reveal actual revenue figures, but suggested its focus on meeting metro cloud and data center interconnect requirements should continue to pay dividends in 2015.

The company said 2014 sales rose in part thanks to a near tripling of metro cloud customers in the past two years. Metro cloud revenue accounted for nearly half of all revenue in 2014, the company estimated. Overall, the BTI Systems added 18 new strategic customers during the year, including announced wins with CyrusOne, Interxion, Pacnet, and IPC.

The year ended with a bang, with bookings up 28% in Q4 2014 versus 3Q13 and revenue up 18%.

The company also made several executive hires in 2014, including Colin Doherty as president and CEO last April (see "Colin Doherty new president and CEO of optical packet transport vendor BTI Systems") and Tim Pillow as senior vice president, worldwide sales. Other major sales-related appointments in 2014 included James Clegg as senior vice president, EMEA sales and Aleck Gilner as senior vice president, Americas sales.

"Businesses and consumers want anytime, anywhere access to their applications and services – cost effectively and with no delay," said Doherty via a press statement announcing the year-end results. "To address these requirements, content is being pushed closer to the users – and to accommodate this, content, colocation and service providers are re-architecting their metro networks to handle the added capacity between data centers, access networks, and cloud providers. BTI's software, systems, and support services lie at the heart of this tectonic shift."

BTI points to forecasts of increased interest in data center interconnect and metro cloud as harbingers of continued success. For example, it cited forecasts that predict that metro traffic will exceed long-haul traffic in 2015 and make up nearly two-thirds of all IP traffic by 2018. Meanwhile, data center interconnect volumes should growth by more than 400% by 2019. Market research firm ACG Research, meanwhile, is said to expect DCI equipment sales to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 58.4% between 2014 and 2019 to reach more than $4 billion. Much of that growth will come from the metro, BTI says.

The company also believes it is well positioned to participate in the shift toward software-defined networking (SDN) via its Intelligent Cloud Connect platform and BTI Cloud Exchange Solution, which leverages open APIs in the SDN-enabled BTI proNX Control Software platform.

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