Acacia bets on silicon as coherent enters its next phase
Thursday, April 4, 2019 at 9:50AM Gazettabyte interviewed Acacia Communications’ president and CEO, Murugesan ‘Raj’ Shanmugaraj, as the coherent technology company celebrates its 10th anniversary.
Acacia Communications has come a long way since Raj Shanmugaraj (pictured) first joined the company as CEO in early 2010. “It was just a few conference rooms and we didn't have enough chairs,” he says.
The company has since become a major optical coherent player with revenues of $340 million in 2018; revenues that would have been higher but for the four-month trade ban imposed by the US on Chinese equipment maker ZTE, an Acacia customer.
And as the market for coherent technology continues to grow, Acacia and other players are preparing for new opportunities.
“We are still in the early stages of the disruption," says Shanmugaraj. “You will see higher performance [coherent systems] in some parts of the network but there is going to be growth as coherent moves closer to the network edge.”
