VIAVI boosts productivity, efficiency for telecoms in India: Oleg Khaykin

By Sanjeeb Kumar Sahoo

In an email interaction with Voice&Data, Oleg Khaykin President & CEO, Viavi Solutions elaborates on the company’s worldwide operations and the opportunities the company is looking at leveraging in India

 Voice&Data: Please tell us more about VIAVI Solutions?

Oleg Khaykin: VIAVI Solutions, formerly known as JDS Uniphase (JDSU), is a global leader in both network service enablement and optical security and performance products and solutions. Our technologies contribute to the success of a wide range of customers – from the world’s largest mobile operators and government entities to enterprise network and application providers through to the contractors laying the fiber and building the towers that keep us connected.

Headquartered in Milpitas, California USA, VIAVI’s network and service enablement history can be traced back nearly 100 years. We have built our company up from our roots as pioneers in copper testing to now helping build, monitor, and optimize the world’s most complex service provider and enterprise networks.

Our customers use VIAVI to identify and solve network problems quickly. Our products and solutions are “must haves” for our customers – both across the network and throughout the lifecycle. VIAVI products and solutions are modular and easy to use. We have solutions that allow engineers to design field tests in the office once – then deploy them across-the-board in the field. Many of our instruments perform multiple functions. These are a few of the features that make VIAVI products good value for large organizations. We reduce the need for training and allow complex tests and analyses to be carried out by a larger volume of personnel.

The world’s largest network providers, governments, and industries ranging from aerospace and pharmaceuticals rely on VIAVI to help them deliver high-quality, secure, mission-critical products and services to their customers.

VIAVI understands the networks of the future and is working with key industry players to develop and deploy solutions to plan, build, certify, and optimize complex evolving networks.

Voice&Data: Can you elaborate on the extent of VIAVI India presence?

Oleg Khaykin: VIAVI Solutions has been present in India for more than 20 years now and has been supplying its state of the art technology instruments to Indian telcos, R&D Labs, Defence, and Public Sector Units among others.

VIAVI in India is headquartered in Gurgaon with sales offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru. Sales, Pre-Sales and Support staff are available at all the locations to address the needs of our customers. The IT Development Centre is in Pune which is engaged in design, implementation, maintenance, support, enhancement of sophisticated database systems and enterprise application technologies. VIAVI India has its repair and calibration centre in Gurgaon and our technicians here ensure that our customers’ equipment is functioning properly by completing any maintenance and installing enhancements including engineering change notice updates.

Our SDH Analyser ANT-20 has been the leader in its domain in India and is the first choice of all our esteemed customers here. VIAVI OTDRs (Optical Time-Domain Reflectometers) and Fibre Optic Handhelds are used by all operators, system integrators and contractors in this segment.

VIAVI in India also works with channel partners to educate our customers and deliver superior sales and service support. We work hand-in-hand with partners with a joint commitment to increasing the value of VIAVI instruments, software, and platforms.

Voice&Data: What solutions VIAVI offers to Indian telecom operators?

Oleg Khaykin: VIAVI Solutions is active in the broader industries we serve – partnering with our customers and other key players to enable complex market and technology development and growth across the globe. Our major telecom customers in India are BSNL, MTNL, Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, Tata Communications and their network equipment suppliers – Ericsson and Nokia.

VIAVI offers a full range of solutions to India telecom operators:

• In-line and built-in test and measurement instruments for network equipment manufacturers.
• Full network and lifecycle coverage for service providers.
• Performance optimization and troubleshooting for enterprise and cloud providers.
• Cable and fiber test equipment that is critical to all new network deployments.

We have the most in-depth coverage and knowledge – eliminating finger-pointing in multi-stage deployments and reducing or eliminating engineering costs associated with piecing together disparate equipment to gain full visibility across the network. VIAVI in India has helped many of its telco customers to increase productivity and efficiency by developing MOPs, optimizing workflows and sharing of global best practices.

Voice&Data: What growth VIAVI expects in India and APAC?

Oleg Khaykin: VIAVI has grown its business in India and APAC over the past few years and these regions contribute significantly in VIAVI’s global growth strategy. The team here is dedicated to delivering value to our customers and have deep industry experience with sharp market focus.

Voice&Data: In your view, what opportunities India market offers?

Oleg Khaykin: VIAVI is a dominant player in the field of test and measurement solutions in India and engaged in multiple opportunities with both government and private sector.

Broadband (wireless and fixed), Network for Spectrum, Digital India and the National Optical Fiber Network are driving the need for test instruments in India.

The telecom operators are fiberizing their cell towers and building optical networks for backhaul in order to scale them up for higher speeds due to the rising needs of data-driven consumers.

Fiber instruments continue to form the largest component of the market and VIAVI has both handhelds and its Optical Network Management System, which can also play a major role in the automation initiatives of operators.

Asides from operators, VIAVI also sees momentum in the lab and manufacturing segment, storage networking and chip development companies in India.

Data Center and Cloud services providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google have either set up local data centers in India, or are in the process of doing so, to better serve the needs of Indian enterprises and SMBs (small and medium businesses), widening the potential opportunities for VIAVI.

Voice&Data: Can you please highlight the key developments related to Test & Measurement solutions at VIAVI?

Oleg Khaykin: VIAVI is fortunate to serve over 200 top-tier communications service providers—mobile, cable, telco—worldwide, and we continuously work with them to address revolutionary network changes that are happening across multiple technologies. Network operators are developing new architectures based on gigabit technologies, 5G, network function virtualization (NFV), heterogeneous networks, automation, and 400G cores. Enterprises are struggling to achieve comprehensive, real-time visibility across hybrid IT infrastructure including on-premise, physical, virtual and cloud domains. VIAVI’s technology roadmap is based on these and emerging requirements from our customers.

VIAVI has significantly advanced the state of the overall test, measurement and assurance industry across multiple technologies and ecosystems:

• The race to Gigabit: The first true DOCSIS 3.1 installation and service meter; field-testing for G.fast pilots; the industry’s first CATV meter for DOCSIS 3.1, FTTx and Wi-Fi.
• Virtualization: The most advanced Virtual Test & Activation solution, winning the 2016 MEF Excellence Award for Third Network Proof of Concept Innovation.
• Serving the data center: The rapid increase of data consumption and bandwidth have forced enterprise data centers to begin adopting technologies previously reserved for service provider networks, including fiber.
• Lighting the path to 5G: Even nominally mobile technologies such as 5G require fiber networks for fronthaul, backhaul and core to be successful.
• Building the 400G ecosystem: Delivery of the industry’s first and most widely distributed 400G test platform; demonstration of the industry’s first fully interoperable 400GbE test system with FEC. The timescale for each emerging high-speed technology to transition from being tested in the lab to being widely available in metro networks is getting shorter and shorter, and VIAVI is gearing its R&D plan to bring technologies downstream from lab to field test solutions in remarkably compressed intervals.