What Calix Won't Do With $100M

As Recovery Act applications are being approved, Calix Inc. (NYSE: CALX) announced today that it is getting ready for action as Tier 2 and Tier 3 service providers look to expand their broadband networks.

The Petaluma, Calif.-based access equipment vendor said:

• It has raised $50 million in equity funding from existing Calix investors. (See Calix Nets $100M More.)
• It has arranged $50 million in debt financing from Silicon Valley Bank .
• It has added Michael Marks of Riverwood Capital, Adam Grosser of Foundation Capital , and Robert Finzi of Sprout Group to its board of directors.

And with all that activity going on, don't expect the firm to go all Hatteras Networks Inc. on us. (See Carrier Ethernet Equipment Is Very Much Exciting These Days.)

Calix, which brought in $250 million in revenues in 2008, insists that this huge funding event is business as usual.

"We've got huge opportunities in front of us in access infrastructure and lots of work that we can do in the access infrastructure to help our customers be successful, and that's what we're going to do," says Carl Russo, Calix's CEO. "We don't have any plans to hire a hundred people to go do something -- that would just be out of our nature."

A bit later in a conversation with Light Reading on Friday, Russo noted: "We haven't changed in our strategy. There's nothing about this that you should read into it that they're getting a war chest together to go acquire or do a particular thing."

Know what else Calix isn't going to do? It isn't looking to take on huge outsourcing projects from its customers in the same way that the larger telecom equipment vendors have done. "Our goal is not to outsource people from our customers," Russo says. "Our goal is to figure out how to remove work from the process, not by removing it and moving it to Calix, but by drastically simplifying the operations of their networks."

— Phil Harvey, Editor-in-Chief, Light Reading