Viavi Solutions has a new CEO as of this week, with Oleg Khaykin taking over from interim president and CEO Richard Belluzzo. Viavi had been operating under Belluzzo’s leadership since former CEO Tom Waechter stepped down after the split of JDSU into Viavi and Lumentum.
Khaykin has 28 years of experience and comes to Viavi from technology-focused private equity firm Silver Lake Partners, where he was a senior advisor. Prior to that, he was president and CEO of power management company International Rectifier for eight years and started his career as an engineer at Motorola Solutions.
“Oleg is an accomplished technology CEO with an impressive track record, including the success in transforming International Rectifier,” said Belluzzo in a statement on the transition. “The board feels Oleg is an excellent choice to capitalize on our recent progress and lead the company to achieve our goals of growth and expanded profitability. I look forward to working with Oleg to ensure a successful transition.”
Khaykin officially stepped into his role as Viavi CEO on Wednesday.
Viavi also announced its most recent quarterly results, with improvements in profitability. Net revenues increased 2.5% year-over-year to $232.1 million. Net income for the quarter was $3.3 million, compared to a loss of $37.7 million in the same period last year and a loss of $13.6 million in the prior quarter. Belluzzo called the quarter a “solid performance” and noted Viavi met or exceeded the high end of its guidance.
On the equipment side, Viavi made a new feature available on its CellAdvisor Base Station Analyzer, to support baseband unit emulation during the installation of remote radio heads in order to speed up the amount and type of testing that can be done as RRHs are first put up and before a baseband unit has been installed.
“By adding BBU emulation, CellAdvisor opens up a more comprehensive cell site test to identify and address problems on the first visit,” Viavi said. Technicians, the company said, can now put the radios on-air to check performance, troubleshoot and look for interference. “Previously, these tests were possible only once the [baseband unit] had been installed and turned up, which could take up to 30 days after radio installation,” Viavi added.
The company also launched a new network visibility product for hybrid cloud/on-premise networks, extending its Observer platform with Observer SightOps for monitoring and packet capture.
In other test news this week, new functionalities are starting to be supported in test equipment in order for the industry to move forward with validating and implementing them.
–Cobham Wireless added test support for license assisted access, in which cellular and unlicensed frequencies at 5 GHz are aggregated, to its TM500 network testing product line. LAA is part of LTE Release 13, which is expected to be finalized shortly. Cobham said the TM500 family now supports all the main features of Release 12 along with LAA validation.
–Rohde & Schwarz said its R&S TS8980FTA-S test system is the first conformance system with validated test cases for uplink carrier aggregation in TDD bands. Carrier aggregation has so far focused on downlink aggregation; the new support allows two component carriers to be aggregated for faster uplink speeds.
–EXFO launched what it says is the industry’s first G.fast handheld tester for rolling out high-speed networks via copper. G.fast is designed to bring higher, fiber-level speeds to copper connections, and EXFO said it has already successfully trialled the new tester with operators. The MaxTester 635G test set supports the International Telecommunications Union’s recommendations for G.9700 and G.9701 recommendations as well as current technologies and also has mobile and cloud support for data management in the field.
Stéphane Chabot, VP of EXFO’s Physical Layer Test Division, said in a statement the company is “seeing significant interest from our customers concerning the deployment of new G.fast technology solutions. They are attracted by its fiber-like speeds, which can be achieved more economically than full fiber-to-the-home deployments.”
EXFO recently revamped its product lines of fiber optic testers and optical line measurement, and also launched a quad OTDR handheld tester aimed at the data center and enterprise markets.
–Keysight Technologies announced product re-designs focused on usability, with touch screens supporting pinch/zoom gestures, swiping and dragging, among other features. The company has new X-series signal analyzers with the enhanced user interface that also have integrated 1 GHz bandwidth analysis capabilities. In software, Keysight released its latest Advanced Design System software version with new circuit and electromagnetic simulation features as well as a new-to-the-industry hybrid memory cube software release for compliance testing.
–Anritsu made new “Internet of Things”-focused functionality available on its universal wireless test set equipment, via three new software options designed to support IoT device and system verification for 802.11p, Bluetooth DLE and Z-Wave. Anritsu also launched a new converter it said integrates with its signal quality analyzer for 128G PAM-4 and bit error rate testing.
–GL Communications announced new 10 Gbps Ethernet testing solutions, including traffic generation and performance measurement capabilities for throughput, latency, frame loss and other quality metrics.
