How to untangle test complexity (continued)
A continuation of our interview with Naom Lotan, president and CEO of MRV Communications, which appeared in the February 2009 Viewpoint column.
By Larry Maloney, Contributing Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 2/1/2009 2:00:00 AM
 Noam Lotan President and CEO MRV Communications Chatsworth, CA Noam Lotan has served as MRV president and CEO since May 1990. Before that, he was managing director of Fibronics, the UKFontainebleau, France. Lotan also serves as a director for Capstone Turbine. subsidiary of Fibronics International, a manufacturer of fiber-optic communication networks later acquired by MRV. Earlier in his career, Lotan held a variety of sales and marketing positions with Fibronics and Hewlett-Packard. He holds a BS in electrical engineering from the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, and an MBA from INSEAD (European Institute of Business Administration), Contributing editor Larry Maloney interviewed Lotan by phone on the growing interest in test automation. Read the first part of this interview. |
Q: How has MRV’s product focus evolved over the years?
A: MRV was founded in 1988 as a maker of optoelectronic components. Our power transceivers, for example, can be found in 2 million homes in North America that have Verizon’s FIOS service for delivering high-speed Internet, TV, and phone service. We also provide pluggable transceivers to the networking industry. Over the years, the company has added switches, routers, physical-layer products, and console-management products. Many of these products are manufactured by our wholly owned subsidiary, SourcePhotonics.
How relevant are these products to our test-automation business? The fact that we have a very deep knowledge of optical technology, network equipment, and network management gives us a system-level understanding of the challenges facing engineers in communications test. We have been active in developing technologies for the physical layer of networks for many years, and our product mix evolved from optical components to media conversion products and later on to WDM (wave-division multiplexing) products.
Getting into test automation with our cross-connect line was a natural outgrowth of this experience, as we explored ways to help customers deploy these new networking technologies. Now, test automation has become one of the fastest growing parts of our business.
Q: What segments of the network market show the best promise for growth?
A: The storage equipment market shows great growth potential, as does Metro Ethernet, which is being driven by the demand for greater bandwidth and backup for disaster recovery. In addition, carriers and wireless operators are looking for ways to monitor and troubleshoot networks remotely, in order to save the costs of on-site repairs by technicians. That has led to greater interest in out-of-band networks that reduce the need for on-site maintenance to correct problems. In the future, for example, power companies could use out-of-band networks to monitor and control the levels of air conditioning in homes and offices to avoid rolling blackouts during periods of high electricity demand.
Q: How about MRV applications in aerospace and defense?
A: Test automation is particularly critical in these applications because of the very high price of product failure. Automation is essential when you have to perform hundreds of thousands of tests, quickly identify problems, and perform root-cause analysis. A big plus for our company in this market, where we have customers like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, is the fact that we support the FireWire interface with our SFP (small form factor pluggable) transceivers. Increasingly, FireWire is becoming a standard in weapons systems.
Q: What’s the goal of the new Test Automation Alliance (TAA)?
A: The mission of this group, which we joined this past June, is to make it easier for customers to deploy test automation. Spirent Communications initiated the alliance, which brings together best-in-class testing companies that are focused on helping service providers and network equipment manufacturers improve productivity across the entire product-development and service-deployment life cycle. All of us are providing our best ideas to develop a common vision for optimizing lab infrastructure through automation.
Working with the TAA will help us to contribute to a better-integrated solution that will make lab automation even more compelling. This will include standards on such things as graphical user interfaces to make sure that automation products are interoperable.
Q: How will advances in communications networks drive the future direction of your products?
A: As I mentioned earlier, the industry is migrating toward higher and higher data rates, so network equipment vendors will have to make more sophisticated equipment, and we must stay ahead of the curve. Having a toe in the water on the component side, where we are developing solutions for 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps, is very beneficial, as are the partnerships that we have developed with IC manufacturers.
Last year, for example, we announced the Optical Cross Connect, an all-optical physical-layer switch designed to support next-generation data rates to 100 Gbps. The OCC is based on a 3D-MEMS (three-dimensional microelectromechanical systems) switching matrix that allows transparent switching of single-mode fiber connections in less that 20 ms. This technology makes the OCC ideal for maintaining optical attributes when testing high-data-rate LAN, WAN, and WDM-based equipment.
Beyond these developments, we’ll continue to build our systems in a modular fashion, so engineers can more easily add or swap out equipment. We also look for more opportunities created by the wireless industry, such as the spread of WiMAX. It’s interesting, for example, that lower-income individuals now make up the fastest growing segment of iPhone owners. This shows that more people want to get all their communications while they are on the go. We’ll also see such developments as automatic wireless transmission of data from meters to the cell towers of utility companies, using very low frequencies. All these areas open up opportunities for test automation.
Q: Where is MRV expanding globally?
A: MRV has traditionally been very strong in Europe. We have manufacturing divisions in both Switzerland and Israel. North America is also very important, and we have operations in California and Massachusetts. I’ve always believed that if you can’t succeed in North America, you won’t make it anywhere else.
Clearly, China is emerging in importance, and we recently made a significant acquisition that gives us a 1000-person, fiber-optic manufacturing plant in Chengdu. The Chengdu facility allows us to leverage other initiatives in China and gives us ready access to the customer base.
As for other emerging areas, our involvement in the TAA has helped to open up the market in India, where we hope to expand. So, we have significantly increased our global presence, including strong relationships with mobile operators in Japan, Europe, and North America. T&MW
Read the first part of this interview.
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