Test, measurement and monitoring instruments provider Textronix Communications recently has undertaken a series of activities to strengthen its Network Intelligence portfolio and to provide a one-stop-solution by empowering network operators and service providers to gain competitive insight into all facets of their business. EDN Asia recently caught up with Richard “Rich” McBee, President, to learn more about some of the enhancements in the company’s portfolio as well as its focus on network intelligence. He also discussed the company’s acquisition of Arantech and some of the trends in the instrumentation and management solutions market in the Asia-Pacific. Excerpts:
How is business so far for Tektronix this year amid the global economic situation?From a year-over-year perspective, we’ve been very pleased with the business, especially our network monitoring business. We had a very successful first half of this year, and people are excited about the second half.
What are some of the latest changes in Tektronix’s portfolio?We continue to increase the bandwidth and capacity that we have, we continue to add several new applications again and again. The biggest thing we had recently is this capability with customer experience management, which is a very important component of what we call our Network Intelligence Solution strategy. If you step back and look at Textronix Communications, the big shift within the company is our focus on this concept of network intelligence solutions, which is the ability to provide real-time collection of data, and to be able to take that and correlate it, and then add customer experience management.
The company recently announced the acquisition of Arantech. What is the strategy behind this?The reality is that every carrier has a need to look at customer experience management. And this is a very fast growing market for us. Arantech complements the company’s solution. In places where there are Arantech solutions, we have the ability to bring back-up underneath that. The Arantech solution is probe-agnostic; it can be used on a lot of probes, including competitive probes.
What are some of the latest trends in the instrumentation/diagnostics and management solutions market in India, China, and elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific region?I think one of the key trends in the market is that everybody is moving to LTE; that would be the next big technology. There’s a tremendous amount of subscriber growth, and obviously the two biggest geographies for that are China and India. In the more populated areas where there have been wireless services for a longer period of time, we see strong growth in smart phones.
On the other end of the curve, there’s tremendous amount of growth in just plain old 2G communications just getting out. What we see, and we’ve seen this many times played itself all over the world, is that when we have the lower-end technology, there’s a tremendous amount of effort to get as much capacity out there as fast as you possibly can.
On the carrier side, we are seeing three things that are important for them today: one, they are doing a significant amount of work to reducing cost at their networks; second, there is a kind of relentless pursuit to put new applications in their networks, and that requires test and monitoring to determine how it is going; and the third thing, which is really starting to be a fast and emerging segment, is that carriers are really concerned about customer experience in using their networks.
So we see continued growth in the region, we see continued bandwidth pressure, and we’re seeing the move from Quality of Service (QoS) to customer experience management
Femtocells—what is the current state of adoption? Most of the carriers now worldwide are in the trial stage. There are still technical challenges associated with these femtocells. There’s the environment, in particular the home premise environment. If you put a femtocell in your premise, you expect the same quality of voice and capability, the same with the broadband access. One of the challenges that operators have is to know how it is operating in the premise. Compared to the classic mobile environment, you don’t have an RNC in a femtocell environment. You have basically a home node B, and a gateway, which is looking at 20,000 node Bs.
That is why carriers are very into QoS because they don’t want churn.
What are Tektronix’s upcoming plans for Asia? We are the undisputed market leader in the Americas and the European market. We tend to be in that space. But what we’d like to do is dramatically expand our footprint in this region, and we’re making investments to do that. Asia-Pacific is definitely a focus area for us in the future. It is not the largest slice of our revenue pie right now, but it is growing rapidly for a smaller base.
It is an area that we are seeing a lot of subscriber growth, and we are seeing a lot of evolution through these enhanced services here in the region; and those are strong drivers for our products. We already have a large development center in Shanghai, China, as well as a service center in Singapore.
