Ixia’s New President and COO

October 2, 2007

Loyal TMC readers and visitors are likely aware of Atul Bhatnagar who was a keynote speaker about two years back at ITEXPO in Los Angeles, CA. The year Atul spoke was the first time Internet Telephony Conference & Expo was in the Los Angeles Convention Center and this was also the first time we had Michael Powell and Carly Fiorina as speakers so apologies in arrears to Bhatnagar if these two other speakers may have received excessive promotion by me at the time.

Lately though it hasn’t been Fiorina or Powell making headlines. If you haven’t been paying attention, Bhatnagar has been making some big news of his own as he is now the new President and COO of Ixia. I recently had some time to catch up with him and I was able to learn about his new position at the company.

Although he isn’t ready to preach strategy to me yet he is doing quite a bit of analysis of the business and is spending a great deal of time with current customers. So far he sees lots of opportunity in the business. Of course this should come as no surprise as he left Nortel to come to this testing leader.

According to Bhatnagar, “Ixia needs to diagnose issues end-to-end and bring solutions together so customers can deploy converged networks.”

In addition he mentioned the more standards in the testing business the better. Moreover his company is looking to holistically test wireless, wired, data and voice networks.

Another important point he made is that as Ixia pulls together solutions, they want to provide key applications over one architecture with backwards compatibility and future protection for customers.

A final note is the concept of the evolution of multimedia networks. As they evolve he sees scaling going to the next level – testing will need to handle orders of magnitude more simultaneous traffic.

Our conversation digressed into how companies are using testing as a differentiator and how in some cases such as the recent Skype outage, a lack of testing actually can cost a company revenue and also leave it with a black eye in front of customers.

As the testing market gets more complicated we can expect the testing vendors to spend more and more time figuring out how to make life easier for customers who are generally service providers and enterprise customers looking to deploy IP communications and other networks.

So – no hard hitting investigative journalism at this time but in the future I expect to meet with Atul Bhatnagar and ask him about his thoughts on the testing market and how his company will help customers become more productive, efficient and profitable.