Tellabs Blog

I've been fortunate to work on new products several times in my career. Most recently, I worked with a talented group of engineering teammates to bring the Tellabs SmartCore® 9200 Series to life.

Developing a new product is always a bit of science, a bit of art, and a bit of controlled chaos. But in this case, our customers gave us a clear message: we need a network that helps us deliver a consistent quality of experience (QoE) while increasing our revenue and reducing our costs.

Their feedback gave us a clear goal: deliver a new kind of network. A network where operators deliver increasingly complex and diverse services to bandwidth-hungry customers—and do so profitably. A network that gives operators the ability to see trends and adapt accordingly. A network that seamlessly delivers the services users value most.

Tellabs SmartCore® 9200 Series helps operators deliver this new kind of network. It's a smart, simple, scalable and adaptable content-aware edge routing platform. The Tellabs SmartCore® 9200 Series enables growth and value-added service integration.

Playing to our strengths
Our goal is to develop the Tellabs SmartCore® 9200 Series as a differentiated product that helps our customers succeed. Tellabs has an embedded customer base of more than 200 mobile and fixed line customers, and we have helped service providers transition from TDM and ATM to Ethernet, from 2G to 3G and now to LTE.

The key to this is leveraging Tellabs' diverse talent and experience. Our employees' expertise was crucial to the development of the Tellabs SmartCore® 9200 Series, and will be crucial to its deployment. We set lofty goals, such as creating a 1 terabit per slot design and a new operating system, and made them a reality. In the end, we came together to make something unique (see the live demo for yourself).

Fuel for the fire
In addition to leveraging our expertise, we worked closely with our customers to gather input for the Tellabs SmartCore® 9200 Series. We discussed the challenges they faced, where their networks and customers are headed and what the competition looks like. This helped us better understand their pain points. We continue to discuss our customers' visions for the future of the network and how we can help them bring it to life.

Customers are excited. They value the diverse functionality we have designed into a single platform, all managed by a single, time-tested network manager. They are excited about the product's massive scalability and built-in intelligence. Their feedback drove us to build a product that puts them in control of their network and helps deliver new services.

Industry analysts are impressed, too. They also like the Tellabs SmartCore® 9200 Series' scalability, and are impressed with its ability to simplify operators' networks.

A pat on the back
Our employees are excited about the Tellabs SmartCore® 9200 Series, and rightly so. Many people have worked tirelessly to develop a competitive, innovative, unique product, and making it a reality is very rewarding. We've taken the best of what Tellabs has developed as a company—what our talented, innovative engineers have done together over many, many years—and raised the bar.

We are doing this to help our customers succeed, and to help people around the world connect. And we couldn't have done it without really good people.

But we're not done yet. Many challenges and opportunities are still ahead of us: more conversations with customers, adding value through unique network design, and pushing our product (and ourselves) even further. I look forward to keeping you updated on new product developments and customer wins.