Salira Systems was founded to address the problems associated with providing cost-effective broadband services in the local access market. Salira's mission is to develop optical solutions that enable carriers to deliver affordable Ultra-High-Speed® Internet access. In order to meet this goal, a team of experienced and highly-skilled engineers was recruited from leading networking and telecommunications corporations including Cisco, Nortel, Marconi, Coppercom, AFC, Tollbridge and Jetstream and freed to "think outside the box."

The exceptional Salira team developed a break-through Passive Optical Network (PON) system architecture capable of leaping the economic and technical hurdles associated with remote provisioning of high-grade broadband services to the business and the home. Salira recognized that to be widely deployed, PONs needed to leverage the simplicity and ubiquity of Ethernet technology because, according to Dataquest, Ethernet is resident on over 95% of corporate desktops and most data traffic is originated in IP/Ethernet format. Also, Ethernet is capable of generating super-fast data rates approaching 10Gbps. Salira will deliver cost-effective broadband services to the local access market by combining IP-centric Multi-Services (voice, video and data) and Super Gigabit Ethernet® with PON Optical Transport to deliver the NeoPon Platform® of next-generation Passive Optical Network solutions.

The company was founded in July 2000 as OptiFront Networks. The company secured Series A funding led by Vertex Management Partners in September 2000 which enabled both the hiring of a veteran technical team and the initiation of product development. In November 2000, the company's name was changed to Salira Optical Network Systems, Inc. Salira is now actively engaged in hiring the additional technical talent needed to execute its coherent and comprehensive product development strategy. Equally important, the company is attracting the business resources needed to craft an innovative go-to-market strategy that will deliver product into the market by the fourth quarter of 2001. As of November 2000, Salira completed its main architectural design and began to develop a bread-board system of hardware and software that will be ready for review in April 2001, with first customer ship scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2001.