New Casa CEO recalls vendor being a 'very tough competitor'

Michael Glickman didn’t use his public introduction as Casa Systems' new president and CEO during the company's Q2 earnings call on Tuesday to outline his strategic vision. But he did reveal how he viewed the supplier of broadband and wireless gear and software before joining the company.

Glickman, who most recently was president of PacketFabric, also held senior executive positions at Cisco Systems, including as SVP of its global service provider unit. As such, he had some run-ins with Casa, which competed with Cisco in the cable tech sector before Cisco effectively exited that business.

"I first became aware of Casa when I was at Cisco and always viewed Casa then as a very tough competitor, given their great technology core and their ability to move fast and disrupt incumbents," Glickman said.

As for his new role at Casa, which officially started on August 1, Glickman predictably said he's excited about it, citing the supplier's focus on emerging areas such as the virtual cable modem termination system (vCCAP) as well as the 5G core and mobile edge computing (MEC) sectors.

"I believe Casa is uniquely well positioned to capitalize on this global market opportunity given their differentiated and proven product portfolio," Glickman said.

It's not yet clear what new ideas he will be bringing to Casa to execute on that opportunity. But he is taking the helm of a company in search of overall growth and in the wake of a recent 13% headcount reduction as the company backed away from parts of the business where was seeing little or no return on investment.

Uptick in cable product revenues

Casa pulled down Q2 revenues of $58 million, down from $70.83 million in the year-ago quarter. That was paired with a net loss of $51.13 million.

A bright spot was cable products, which saw revenues hit $18.72 million, versus $16.10 million in the year-ago quarter. Cable services revenues were relatively flat – $8.76 million versus $9.09 million in the year-ago quarter. Casa shares were down 16.73% in early afternoon trading Wednesday.

Glickman is taking over for Casa's former CEO Jerry Guo, a company founder who remains on the board. Glickman arrives on the scene soon after Casa made good on extending a long-term loan that was hanging over the company's head, a situation that had raised doubts about Casa as a going concern.

Out of that chapter, Ed Durkin, Casa's CFO and one-time interim CEO, told Light Reading in April, that Casa remained "totally committed to cable" as operators continued their pursuit of distributed access architecture (DAA) upgrades and vCMTS technology, a product category currently being dominated by Harmonic.

A recent example of that commitment was Casa's participation in CableLabs' first DOCSIS 4.0 interop.

On the sales front, Casa recently notched a deal to supply vCMTS and DAA tech to Claro Colombia and a separate gateway deal with LGU+ in support of the South Korean operator's network modernization project.

Fighting fear, uncertainty and doubt

On Tuesday, Durkin reiterated a position that Casa secured those deals and others that were delayed by "fear, uncertainty and doubt" spread by a competitor, which surfaced as Casa worked its way through the critical long-term loan extension.

"Many of the deals that got delayed during Q2 for various reasons, including a competitor spread fear, uncertainty and doubt and refinancing concerns, are now in very good shape and expected to close in the coming months," Durkin said.

Casa said it is also making progress with its multi-year deal to supply 5G core software for Verizon's public MEC service offering. Durkin noted that Q2 results don't include $10 million of software revenues from Verizon, which now holds a nearly 10% stake in Casa, that will be recognized in Q3.

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— Jeff Baumgartner, Senior Editor, Light Reading