Established in 2017 as a spinoff from the Optoelectronics Research Centre at the University of Southampton, Lumenisity was formed to commercialise the breakthroughs in the development of hollow core fibre
UK-based hollow core fibre solutions firm Lumenisity acquired by Microsoft. (Credit: efes from Pixabay)
Microsoft has announced the acquisition of UK-based hollow core fibre (HCF) solutions provider Lumenisity for an undisclosed sum.
Through the acquisition, Microsoft expects to bolster its capacity to further streamline its global cloud infrastructure. The tech major also believes that the acquisition of Lumenisity will provide customers of Microsoft Cloud platform and services with strict latency and security requirements.
Established in 2017 at the University of Southampton as a spinoff from the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC), Lumenisity was formed to commercialise the breakthroughs in the development of hollow core fibre.
Lumenisity’s hollow core fibre product is said to deliver global, enterprise, and large-scale organisations with fast, reliable and secure networking.
A wide range of sectors including financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and government could benefit from the hollow core fibre technology, wrote Microsoft Azure Core corporate vice president Girish Bablani, in Microsoft’s official blog.
Bablani further wrote that hollow core fibre could also offer improved security and intrusion detection for local and federal governments around the world.
In healthcare, the fibre technology will accommodate the volume and size of large data sets, which could help expedite medical image retrieval and facilitate the ability of providers for ingesting, persisting, and sharing medical imaging data in the cloud.
Besides, hollow core fibre technology is expected to assist global financial institutions, which want to enable fast and secure transactions across a large geographic region.
Compared to standard silica glass, light through Lumenisity’s fibre technology is claimed to travel 47% faster, resulting in higher overall speed and lower latency.
The hollow core fibre technology also have the potential for ultra-low signal loss enabling deployment over longer distances without the need of repeaters.
Last week, Microsoft was awarded $9bn (Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability) JWCC contracts from US DoD along with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and Oracle.