John Peeler

As the leader of one of the industry's top testing tool manufacturers, it's no small irony to hear Acterna President and CEO John Peeler say that the world didn't really know much about his company until a few months ago. But it's as good a reason as any to at least partially explain why Acterna's stock has seesawed during the last several months.

“A lot of the stock roller coaster came from lack of information on the company and us telling our story,” Peeler says. “We've just started doing that.”

It's a story that started a little more than a year ago with the merger of two of the industry's most influential network testing companies, TTC and Wavetek Wandel Goltermann. Along with Cheetah Advanced Technologies, which was absorbed in August 2000, the rollup has created a testing powerhouse that pulls in more than $1 billion in annual revenue.

As far as launching a new company with a new name, however, timing could have been better. Peeler suggests that Acterna has taken its lumps on Wall Street because its new brand isn't yet as recognizable as TTC or WWG. Still, asked if he would do the merger over again in today's harsher climate, Peeler's answer is unequivocal.

“Absolutely,” he says. “It's been a great success. It puts us in a much stronger position to get through difficult times.”

The more diversified a company is, he says, the better equipped it is to cope in a tough market. By combining the North American assets of TTC with WWG's presence in European and Latin America, Peeler is banking on a larger global customer base.

“If you can really only reach half of the world market, you're at a disadvantage,” he says.

Acterna is also counting on continued growth in high-speed access technologies. “There are still a lot of underlying drivers for growth in these markets,” Peeler says. Those drivers are prompting carriers to build out optical networks, roll out cable modems, deploy new technologies such as IP over Sonet and connect businesses to high-bandwidth services — all applications that require testing tools.

So far, Acterna has been able to avoid any mass layoffs, aside from closing a few small manufacturing sites — an unusual feat given current market conditions and the fact that most merging entities usually have some fat to trim. It also helps that Acterna counts many incumbent carriers among its customers, though “they're certainly tightening budgets like everyone else,” Peeler says.

In the meantime, Peeler will continue working to show the world that whether it's optical transport, access or cable testing, Acterna's gear can test it: “The key is to be continually looking at which technologies are coming and hit the technology waves with all the right products.”