Omnia Communications to be sold for $429 million Md. firm buying Marlborough tech company

A small Marlborough technology company that's never sold a productis about to sell itself for $429 million. That's how much Maryland-based Ciena Corp. will pay to acquire Omnia Communications Inc. andits technology for managing Internet and voice data traffic.

Ciena also announced it would pay $552 million to acquireCalifornia-based Lightera Networks Inc., which makes switches for usein high-capacity data networks. Both Omnia and Lightera are closelyheld. Ciena will pay for the transactions with stock -- 16 millionshares to acquire Omnia and 20.6 million for Lightera. Omnia and its75 employees will remain in Marlborough.

"It's very expensive," said Ciena president and chief executivePatrick Nettles, "but we thought it was a good buy."Nettles is trying to strengthen the product offerings of Ciena,which makes equipment that packs large amounts of data onto fiber-optic communication lines.Omnia, founded two years ago, has designed a product that cancombine multiple voice circuits and Internet connections fortransmission over high-capacity fiber-optic lines. Omnia presidentMichael Champa said his company's product will make it easier fortelephone companies to add service offerings to their networks."With each new service, the phone company has had to install andsupport a new box," Champa said. "What we are doing is totallyintegrating those technologies onto one platform."Mark Cavallone, an analyst for Standard & Poor's Equity Group inNew York, said Ciena needs to expand its offerings beyond its corebusiness."They're looking to expand their market opportunities, tointegrate basic technologies with their own existing technologies,"Cavallone said.Meanwhile, Ciena's customers in the telephone industry are lookingfor a single supplier that can help the phone companies enhance theirservice offerings and increase the capacity of their networks.Ciena's technology, called wave-division multiplexing, allows thesame telephone line to carry many times as much data as it wasoriginally designed to handle. Lightera makes switches that canefficiently direct this torrent of data. And Omnia will provide asingle device that can sort out the data into separate streams ofvoice and computer traffic.But first Omnia must complete work on its device, to be called theAXR 500. Champa said test versions would soon be made available tophone companies. Ciena stock closed down 2 1/16 to 24 3/4 on theNasdaq stock exchange.