Coriant

» see coriant.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The thing that eventually called itself Coriant started as a department inside Siemens in Munich, known in the 1990s as Übertragungstechnik, which means transmission technology and tells you exactly what it did. It moved its customers up the hierarchy as the hierarchy was invented, from plesiochronous to synchronous multiplexing, then into dense wavelength multiplexing when the fiber could carry it. The department went into the Nokia Siemens Networks joint venture. In March 2013 its relaunch as an independent company was announced at the big optical trade show, and on 6 May 2013 it became independent under the ownership of Marlin Equity Partners.

What followed was a roll-up of the previous decade's casualties. Marlin had already bought Sycamore Networks of Chelmsford, Massachusetts in January 2013, and that arm became Coriant America. In December 2013 it bought Tellabs of Naperville, Illinois, and in January 2014 announced the first step of merging Tellabs into Coriant. By the end the company had two headquarters, one in Munich and one in Naperville, and around three thousand people.

A consumer was never going to meet any of this, and the brand barely pretended otherwise, with one exception: the logo was the word "coriant" in lower case with every letter a different color, which is a startup's logo attached to a company whose product line included cross-connects and multi-service provisioning platforms. The name itself was invented for the occasion in 2013, and it lasted five years.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the roll-up ~

Private equity does this a great deal and it is rarely interesting, but the Coriant version is worth laying out because of what got collected. Sycamore Networks was the 1998 startup founded by the two men who had just sold Cascade Communications to Ascend, Gururaj Deshpande and Dan Smith, and it made as much noise as any optical name of the bubble era. Tellabs was much older and much bigger, an Illinois company that had come through every previous shakeout in the sector. Both had been independent and publicly traded with their own obituaries pending, and Marlin bought them inside eleven months of each other to feed one Munich spin-out.

Marlin later spun the telco and GPON pieces back out under the Tellabs name, so the brand it had absorbed came out again while the brand it had created went on toward its own ending. Pat DiPietro ran Coriant as chief executive. Being privately held the whole way through, it never had to publish a revenue figure, and no revenue figure for it was ever published.

~ back where it started ~

On 1 October 2018 Infinera filed the sentence that ends Coriant: it had "completed the previously announced acquisition of all the outstanding limited liability company interests of Telecom Holding Parent LLC," which is the legal name the brand had been sitting on top of. The trade press reported the deal at around $430 million. The filing itself is more specific and slightly different, giving 20,975,384 Infinera shares plus cash consideration of approximately $230 million, of which about $154 million was handed over at closing. On the same day Infinera appointed David Heard as chief operating officer.

The business had been cut out of Nokia Siemens Networks not quite twelve years before that, when the joint venture was shedding everything that was not mobile broadband. On 28 February 2025 Nokia completed its acquisition of Infinera, and the optical transport line that had been Siemens Übertragungstechnik, then Nokia Siemens, then Coriant, then Infinera, became part of Nokia's Optical Networks unit. David Heard, promoted to Infinera's chief operating officer on the very day the Coriant purchase closed and later its chief executive, went across to Nokia too, into its Network Infrastructure group. The equipment made the round trip. The two names it wore in between did not.

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