Champion ONE is a leading provider of OEM compatible or third-party optical transceivers and passives.
However, the term “third party” often gets confused with another concept – grey market – a totally different type of product. This is the first of two blog posts where we’re going to try to explain the differences, and why they matter.

What does Third-Party Mean?
First off, third-party suppliers exist in all sorts of industries and are typically companies that have a high degree of specialization in their field. Third party comes up most often in technical areas. For example, software developers create programs that can be used on platforms created by another company, and often do so to fill a niche that the platform developer cannot or will not address (for whatever reason), but users may need. A quick look at that description will also give you the basis for the term ‘third-party’. It’s not the platform or OEM (first party), or the user (second party), but another (third-party) developer that brings a solution to the marketplace.

Some of the confusion arises in the telecom/datacom industry, where there are OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) that really aren’t manufacturing anything, but rather, have things built for them under contract, and then “integrate” this solution under their brand name. Then there are OEMs that continue to supply components to other OEMs, while establishing a brand of their own. They can also be considered third-party for other OEMs, if they’ve not explicitly been brought into the fold as a ‘vendor’ to that OEM.

It really comes to a head when you look at the subject of this blog: transceivers. Transceivers are components which, thanks to the MSA, are standardized for use in a variety of devices such as switches and routers. However, the switch and router manufacturers DO NOT build their own transceivers. Instead, they have them built, under contract. They’re not considered third-party because they are sold by the OEM, under their brand – and usually with a cost premium for that distinction.

Champion ONE has been supplying transceivers for over ten years, and our approach has always been to be a vendor agnostic supplier of transceivers to users (the second party) of the switches and routers (the first party). Because of this, we take the same approach – we have our transceivers built for us, under contract, by the same transceiver OEMs that build for the switch and router OEMs. And just like the switch and router OEMs, we have our parts labeled and programmed with our information. This is why we’re third party – it’s a Champion ONE part that is being sold, not a Cisco, or Juniper, or Alcatel-Lucent part. But it’s an MSA compliant part, so it works cross platform.

Now that we know what a third-party transceiver is, we’ll tackle the topic of ‘grey market’ products, and how they are very different from what Champion ONE offers. See you next time!