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Travis Ewert, Chief Operating OfficerWhat differentiates LightRiver is its team that has expertise in Optical Networks, MPLS, and Carrier Ethernet, among many other networking technologies. Team LightRiver offers services such as technology architecture analysis, network engineering consulting, network upgrade planning, and compliance consulting to deliver turn-key solutions with unparalleled customer care. Over the years LightRiver has architected, engineered, built, and installed some of the largest and most complex networks on the planet. This overarching experience and that of being close partners with the industries’ premier network equipment suppliers has helped the company gain in-depth networking knowledge that it rechannels into its SDN and Optical Domain Controller offerings.
“The broader LightRiver staff has tremendous operations and engineering experience in the business and technology of deploying and managing advanced transport networks,” says Travis Ewert, Chief Operating Officer at LightRiver. “We are involved with the end-to-end process of architecture and technology selection, advanced engineering, building these solutions within our labs,live deployments within the field, and technology lifecycle thereafter. This customer oversight, when coupled with our deep understanding of our partner technologies, gives us a very unique understanding that can be applied to our network automation development. Automation must account for ‘what happens in the real world’ and not just that which is certified against a captive lab instance.”
Having customer experience at the core of its business strategy, LightRiver has built “netFLEX®,” a disruptive, industry award-winning platform that advances network automation to simplify, standardize, and personalize the Operations and End Customer experience.
netFLEX leverages real-time understanding of network and service inventory within it’s Path Computation Engine to automate end-to-end provisioning with quality not achieved with traditional OSS.
Automation must account for ‘what happens in the real world’ and not just that which is certified against a captive lab instance
LightRiver blends its network engineering expertise, product reach, testing resources, and logistics management capabilities into its other unique offering, Factory Built Network® (FBN), which is the culmination of the company’s skills and experience. Through this innovative, multi-vendor technology laboratory and factory, LightRiver’s experts build and deploy high-performing, cost-effective, reliable transport networks at a rapid pace. Having established a strong leadership position in the market with its “award-winning design and Tier -1 vendor certification,” LightRiverFBN reduces the risk and complexity by pre-building and validating within the labs, to ensure less time on customer sites, faster deployments, more reliability, dramatic cost savings, and an unrivaled customer experience. Exceptions to the process are caught early and remediated to ensure that field deployments and personnel do not encounter surprises. Additionally, FBN allows for customized training to the customer on their new network during the factory-build process, ahead of field deployment. As a commitment to continuous innovation, LightRiver plans to expand upon these industry leading disciplines for Optical Domain Control and Factory Built Networks, to more tightly bake-in SDN control automations where Network and Service Health are more deeply integrated and customized into deployment and assurance lifecycle (leveraging whitebox/disagg, FBN performance baselining, AI/ML, and more).
“We are just getting started as we more deeply and meaningfully leverage automation to enable simplification and personalization, as the customer would define,” concludes Ewert.
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Company
LightRiver
Management
Travis Ewert, Chief Operating Officer and Glenn Johansen, President & CEO, Mike Jonas, President of Global Customer Operations and Dean Campbell, Chief Technology Officer
Description
LightRiver is the premier provider of next generation, multi-vendor, Factory Built Networks® and netFLEX®, vendor neutral, Optical Domain Control Software solutions. LightRiver is expert in Packet Optical, DWDM/ROADM, MPLS and Carrier Ethernet systems and designs, engineers, commissions, automates and supports next generation, software controlled, transport networks for mission-critical clients that require the highest capacity, reliability, resiliency and manageability that today’s optical communications technology can deliver. LightRiver delivers unique value with turnkey hardware and software solutions, carrier-grade quality and unparalleled customer care in multi-technology networking
With LightRiver since 2003, Mike Jonas has served as President of Customer Operations for over ten years, leading business and technology development. Jonas’ prior experience includes the development and application of software, hardware, and manufacturing technologies to mobile and wireless, and rugged computing platforms for the military, law enforcement and automotive industries in various C-suite positions. Jonas holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree from Stevens Institute of Technology and an MBA.
Established in 1998, LightRiver is North America’s largest multi-vendor transport systems integrator for network operators, offering full lifecycle hardware, software, services, and support solutions in multi-technology networking. It specializes in the design, procurement, delivery, and ongoing technical support of heterogenous transport networks and the open software tools to discover, monitor, provision, and control multi-vendor packet optical networks.
Mike Jonas, CEO
First, on behalf of everyone at LightRiver, I want to thank Glenn for his leadership in building an organization committed to integrity, excellence and innovation. I am excited to leverage that foundation as we take LightRiver to the next level, accelerating the adoption of open and disaggregated technologies, practical network automation and white glove managed services.
Johansen, former CEO
For the past 25 years, founding and building LightRiver and leading its employees has been one of the great honors of my life. Thanks to their passion and support, as well as that of our partners, we have been able to create a business that provides world class solutions for our customers. Through focus and a deep understanding of their needs, we have helped our clients to evolve with the right next-generation technologies. Mike has been key in building LightRiver’s culture and business for over twenty years, and the Company could not be in better hands in pursuit of that next level of growth and success.
Nikola Trkulja, Managing Director at Grain Management
Under Glenn’s leadership, LightRiver has grown into a market and technology leader. We are confident in Mike’s ability to continue driving this successful business to greater heights, and we are pleased to welcome him as the new CEO.