BTI Systems raises $8.5 million in new funding

BTI Systems, an Ontario-based optical company with offices in Littleton, Mass., on Monday raised $8.5 million in new funding from investor Bain Capital Ventures.

Sally Bament, SVP of global marketing at BTI, told the Boston Business Journal that the latest round of funding included all of the company's previous investors, including Kodiak Venture Partners, GrowthWorks and Fujitsu.

This follows a previous round where the optical vendor raised $23 million, which was also led by Bain Capital.

As stated in an SEC filing this round, BTI plans to secure another $3.5 million.

The vendor said that the new funding will be used to fund an upcoming cloud and data center initiative. However, it would not provide any details beyond saying it would make an announcement in the "next several weeks."

BTI is an up-and-coming vendor in the growing Packet Optical Transport Systems (P-OTS) segment of the optical networking industry, winning a number of contracts with Tier 2 telcos and CLECs, including Consolidated Communications (Nasdaq: CNSL), Frontier Communications (Nasdaq: FTR), and CBeyond (Nasdaq: CBEY).

This cloud initiative will likely resonate well with CBeyond. In October, the CLEC deployed BTI's P-OTS platform as the foundation for its fiber-based cloud service initiative. 

While BTI does not have the market share of larger players such as Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) and Ciena (Nasdaq: CIEN), the P-OTS market is a growth market that's showing opportunity for vendors.

Infonetics forecasts that service providers overall will spend a cumulative $6.6 billion on second-generation P-OTS platforms that incorporate both Ethernet and OTN/SDH switching between 2012 and 2016.

For more:
- Boston Business Journal has this article

In Detail: Following the Packet Optical Transport Systems (P-OTS) evolution

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