Ever-expanding Adva eyes WiMAX

The day after Adva Optical Networking announced last week’s acquisition of Movaz Networks, Adva’s chief executive officer Brian Protiva visited with several WiMAX companies at the Globalcomm trade show to learn more about WiMAX’s applicability to Adva’s business. For the moment, however, Adva has no plans to add WiMAX to its wares. And Protiva said it doesn’t need to.

“The potential is there,” Protiva said. “We are looking at that market space.”

However, even without a wireless solution, Adva could grow its revenue as much as 30% per year, he added. “We don’t need wireless per se today.”

With the recent acquisitions of Movaz and Covaro Networks, Adva sells a range of optical core, metro and access products.

It would be “fatal” for Adva to lose focus of its current business by developing a wireless solution internally, Protiva said. Partnering with a wireless vendor, however, would be far less dangerous.

“As long as we weren’t developing it ourselves, one could imagine we could do that,” he said. “We have a pretty strong sales force. We’ve selectively added [original equipment manufacturer] arrangements to our product portfolio over the last six months. One could imagine we could expand--one every 12 months or something.”

“I was running around…going to the WiMAX players [at Globalcomm],” Protiva said, “understanding their models, their cost points, their products, their densities, thinking that through with a couple of our technologies.”

“Surely you can imagine that wireless could complement a fiber backhauling scenario,” he added. “You could imagine WiMAX has a play in that. You could imagine dropping in wireless going forward in the [multiservice access network] world, which we’re not in today. We might be backhauling already-aggregated IP and Ethernet traffic being driven by the wireless environment. One could imagine you could expand our enterprise business by adding WiMAX solutions to our access solutions to be able to say, ‘Fiber or wireless--we have it both.’ But today we’re not committed to that because our growth opportunity is really big.”