With Bethany Mayer now at the helm at network visibility and test company Ixia, the company is seeking to stay on top of the virtualizing of networks and transition itself alongside the telecom and networking industries.
Mayer came to Ixia from Hewlwtt-Packard, where she led its network function virtualization business, as well as spending time as HP’s VP of marketing and alliances for its enterprise servers storage and networking group. Mayer said that in her previous role at HP, she knew Ixia as a company focused on leading-edge and bleeding-edge technologies in the network.
“I really was, and am, a strong proponent of moving to virtualization in the network,” Mayer said, adding that carriers are beginning to understand the value and possibilities opened up by re-architecting their networks to be software-focused. Software, she said, will be the driving force in networks going forward in order to enable automated behavior changes as well as the possibility of multitenancy.
“The network has been traditionally sort of a one-user solution,” Mayer said. “It hasn’t been able to be utilized efficiently and effectively for multiple users and kinds of applications. … Virtualizing the network gives it huge flexibility and multitenancy, the ability to ensure that the network behaves appropriately for the applications running on it, so you get the best out of the application.”
Mayer took over at Ixia in September, named to the slot after the company went through a year of upheaval that started when it was discovered that former CEO Victor Alston had falsified some of his credentials. After his resignation, the board investigated the company’s financials and discovered several quarters’ worth of errors, with two quarters of earnings that needed to be restated due to reporting errors. The company’s CFO, Tom Miller, resigned at that point. Until Mayer’s hiring, Errol Ginsberg, the company’s chairman and company founder, had been acting as CEO.
Ginsberg said at the time of Mayer’s hiring that she “possesses a deep knowledge of the network equipment and security markets” that will be instrumental to Ixia’s path forward.
Ixia is without a doubt in transition, beyond simply that of changing leadership. Its stock has struggled in the past year, from a high of about $14.53 per share in March 2014 to a steady decline that bottomed out at $8.54 per share in October and has rebounded to around $10.74 per share currently. The lion’s share of the company’s revenue – 64% as of the most recent quarterly results – still come from hardware, with software accounting for only 11% of revenue. Ixia does about 60% of its business in the U.S., with another 22% in the Asia-Pacific region and 13% in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
In addition, the company has said on its last several calls that while it sees great opportunity in the shift to software-defined networking, its customers are slowing spending as they explore exactly what SDN and NFV will mean to them – what Ginsberg described as “a near-term disruption due to the transition to NFV and SDN” that is impacting both Ixia’s network visibility and test business, as customers delay projects or spend cautiously.
The company’s strong points in recent quarters have included its Wi-Fi portfolio and its enterprise position, as well as demand for its products related to security.
Mayer has said that she sees a window of opportunity for Ixia to make gains in the visibility market. Ixia’s competitors JDSU and NetScout are in the midst of changing up their respective businesses, with NetScout digesting a major tie-up with Danaher’s testing business, and JDSU splitting into two companies.
She told RCR that she believes services will be key for Ixia as well, because of the workforce implications that network virtualization will have for its customers.
“This is going to be a cultural change as well, so people will need to be transitioning, or new kinds of folks coming in to the network,” Mayer said. “The network will be addressed by application developers, by folks who haven’t necessarily focused as much on how to use the network.”
Mayer said that Ixia’s intellectual property portfolio puts it in a particularly strong position going forward, having been built over nearly 20 years.
“That portfolio is serving us very well, because we’ve been able to resolve two very key customer problems: Whether or not their applications are performing well, and assuring security of their infrastructure,” Mayer said. “And as far as I know, those are the two key, top-0f-mind issues.”
She has told investors that there is also significant opportunity in the needs of testing for NFV going forward.
“Spend time with many, many CTOs of carriers and their ops people, and I will tell you that the ops people have a different view of NFV – and that is they want to make sure that they continue the service-level performance that they have in the past with our customers,” Mayer said on Ixia’s most recent call. “So in order to move to this, they’re going to need a test in a virtual environment and they’re very used to testing the physical environment, but this is new to them. So they are going to test significantly both prior to deployment, as well as during deployment to ensure that their service levels are at the same place as they were in the physical environment,” Mayer added.
“That’s why I believe Ixia is so strategic, because it will enable this transition to occur.”
