Xtera Communications recently announced Pablo Gargiulo, a veteran of companies such as Genband Inc., Tekelec and Taqua LLC, as its new executive vice president, chief marketing officer and corporate development officer. Gargiulo has been ocean-hopping in recent weeks, but he took some time out to discuss his job goals and plans to grow the company's WAN optimization business.
Light Reading: You're in the Dallas area [Xtera is based in Allen, Tex.] as we speak. To be honest, we're surprised you aren't on the road somewhere.
Gargiulo: Well, I came back last night from Central America. I was in Guatemala and El Salvador last week talking to customers there. Tonight we have our company Christmas party, and then I'm leaving for China.
A lot of my experience is international marketing and sales. When John [Hopper, Xtera's president and CEO] hired me, he said, "The last thing I need is another optical guy. What I really need is someone to complement the management team with different experience and ideas." So, he hired me to head corporate marketing and corporate development, but there's also a unit that does WAN optimization that I have responsibility for inside of corporate development.
Light Reading: When we usually think about Xtera, it's in regard to 100Gbit/s. Tell us more about the WAN optimization effort.
Gargiulo: It's really the other side of the spectrum from Xtera's main business. With WAN optimization, we are talking about two main solutions Xtera has for load balancing and traffic shaping for enterprise data centers. So the focus instead of 100Gbit/s is on the lower end. However, data centers are major consumers of bandwidth now, and you have got to understand how traffic moves through these networks, what you can do to load-balance and shape it and make the best of what you have.
We are selling these solutions mostly in Asia and Latin America right now, but we want to look at selling them more in the U.S. and North America. These data centers are springing up all over the place today, so this is a big opportunity for us. Right now, we have development centers outside of Beijing and Taipei. Our challenge is to bring it to the rest of the world. We have been successful there, so we feel like we have a good cost advantage to bring the rest of the world.
Light Reading: A lot of Xtera's recent market progress has been outside the U.S. in emerging markets. Is that coincidental?
Gargiulo: In the optical market there are different pockets of growth, and emerging markets have been a strong pocket of growth for us. Our success in those markets has not been casual. We have made a lot of efforts in places like Russia, the Middle East and Mexico to get in the position to win business. Even though traffic is larger in the U.S. and Western Europe, the real dramatic growth is happening in the emerging markets, and that growth is what we are trying to link to.
Our main market is still the carriers or consortia of carriers, but we have begun to see utilities in all their forms as an emerging opportunity. CFE, for example, is a power operator in Mexico, and they are in the business of leasing capacity. They have a network of 22,000 km, the widest 100Gbit/s deployment, and we were able to achieve that with 2,500 km all-optical paths in 24 spans.
Light Reading: Overall, what's the main marketing challenge for Xtera?
Gargiulo: The biggest challenge we have is name recognition. Xtera started in 1998, and I think we are known in many of the circles that matter, but we need to expand and ensure that the name means something more. We claim the highest reach and the high capacity for 100Gbit/s equipment, and we need to make sure that message gets to the right places, and that people know we have an X-factor.
Light Reading: Xtera's in the 100Gbit/s business, but we are already hearing a lot about what comes next. Do you think it's a bit early for that talk?
Gargiulo: We're in 100Gbit/s, but we are always working to develop technology capabilities beyond what we have. Bill Szeto, who is our chief technology officer of terrestrial networks, actually was just appointed to the ATIS Board of Directors, where he will be working on a lot of these "beyond 100Gbit/s" issues. The 100Gbit/s market is just getting started, but the take rate on 100Gbit/s is moving faster than 40Gbit/s, so you need to start thinking about what comes next. That said, many applications and services are still running at 10Gbit/s, so 100Gbit/s is going to be with us for a few years.
— Dan O'Shea, Communications Writer, Innovation Generation
