I had a pleasant meeting with Fanfare's vice president of marketing David Gehringer, who was in Miami this week topresent a session at ITEXPO.

An avid TMCnet blogger, Gehringer told me that his firm has been able to weather the ongoing macroeconomic storm by realizing a big swing in sales towards service providers. The company has traditionally been selling to network equipment manufacturers (NEMs) but has done very well as they have expanded their customer base to include carriers, picking up 6-7 new customers  in Q4 of last year.

They're still rolling out to NEMs, Gehringer said, but the trend is that more service providers and the size of the deployments at these carriers is growing.

One thing in Fanfare's favor is that they are able to reuse the same technology that they deploy to NEMs in their service provider deployments as the core technology is the same.

Gehringer mentioned several deals that Fanfare has in place, including ones with BT, AT&T and Verizon. He also mentioned that in addition to working with Spirent on the testing side (Spirent OEMs Fanfare's offering) they are expanding relationships with other  major players in that space.

Looking ahead Gehringer expects to see a lot more business coming from the European markets as a result of Fanfare opening a new office in the UK, and  he said that the Asia Pacific market is doing well for them as well, particularly through the help of Tech Mahindra who is reselling the solutions in Asia.