The two Ottawa-headquartered companies will work together to manage the growing wave of mobile and video traffic threatening to saturate networks worldwide – on technology DragonWave bought through a $9.5-million acquistion last year.
"Our focus is really on the people who own the fibre assets. We have customers that have built infrastructure and they sell services to Verizon, AT&T, Clearwire, T-Mobile. That's what these solutions are targeted at," said Glenn Thurston, BTI's vice-president of global marketing.
BTI, a privately held firm, expects to scale up its existing employee base of 200 in the coming months as it targets rural networks as well as less advanced ones in Europe and Russia.
The Fusion product on which the partnership is centred is based upon technology developed by Axerra Networks in the past few years; the company was acquired by DragonWave in October.
It makes 2G and 3G networks act like the more advanced, packet-ready and data-capable 4G networks through "pseudowire" technology.
Monday's news was a small counterpoint to DragonWave's falling fortunes, which took a downturn last year when chief customer Clearwire slowed its network buildout.
DragonWave has been running to catch up since with new customer deals, but it is taking time; it slashed its Q1 revenue outlook by 26 per cent in early June.
BTI's agreement means "more feet on the street" for DragonWave as a reseller, but spokesperson Reinhard Florin noted he couldn't say much about prospects given the company is in a quiet period right now.
"There is potential in the future to actually look at bringing the legacy DragonWave microwave products into this; it’s premature right now. But that is something that we see as potential down the road," said Mr. Florin, DragonWave's vice-president and general manager of Fusion products in the Americas.
"In addition to the partnership, because BTI doesn’t have that kind of technology and as they’ve been focusing on backhaul with their customers, the customers have been asking what to do with legacy stuff. They couldn't help them before, but now they can," added Connecticut-based Mr. Florin, a former Axerra employee himself.
The partnership will also let BTI sell an "end-to-end" solution for customers as DragonWave's technology works at the edge of networks and BTI's work is at the core, Mr. Florin added.
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