Time-to-Market: Key for T&M Equipment Manufacture

By: BY STEPHEN LAS MARIAS, EDITOR
( 1 Mar 2007 )

Wireless Design and Development Asia recently spoke with Franklin So, General Manager, Agilent Technologies Hong Kong, and Asia Marketing Director for Agilent's Electronic Measurements Group, about the current triple-play segment in Asia—the opportunities, strengths and challenges—and how these issues affect the test andmeasurement equipment industry. Excerpts:

What do you think will continue to drive demand and growth for Asia’s multiple play market, and how do you see the industry will perform in the next several years?
From our point of view, the continuous development of the technologies and solutions for commercial use is one of the major drivers for this segment. In particular, another market driver is entertainment:video, online gaming, movies.

One of the key challenges is the bandwidth requirement. Before, we are on a corporate focus— mainly voice and data, which is in the form of emails. But as we move into the commercial user's world, the requirements will be very different; and this will probably drive the technologies, and alsothe testing challenge in those technologies.

What do you consider the region’s strengths and opportunities and how are you taking advantage of this? What expansion plans have you now lay out for the year?
The Asian market is growing very fast. In the past, the region is only considered a manufacturing hub as a lot of multinational companies set up their manufacturing facilities here. But in the last two years, we have seen a lot of R&D moving over to Asia. While a lot of countries here are stilldeveloping their infrastructures, such as China, India, Vietnam, they require a lot of installationand maintenance tools, which are provided in ourportfolio. With that, we are taking advantage of ourwhole product portfolio, covering from the R&Dto manufacturing and service, and even networkmonitoring and maintenance.

More than 40 percent of our business revenue is coming from Asia that is why we are making a lot of investments in the region. Recently, we set up a 200-strong R&D team in Beijing as well as we just finished setting up a new facility in Beijing. We will be consolidating all our offices in Beijing into thatnew, five-storey facility this year.

We also made a joint-venture with a company in Changzhou, and we have already introduced two products, all fully developed and manufactured in China. Apart from that, we have a factory in Penang. These are some of the key commitments that wehave here.

How do you stave off competition in the triple-play T&M market in the region?
We consider the value proposition to the end users the challenge. There are multiple technologies coexisting today, and it would continue to be like that. It is very difficult for one to dominate. So, how these different technologies can play against each other will be certainly one of the things that the network equipment manufacturers would need to consider, making the right plans, and also bringing in their technology advantage into full use. So definitely we need to understand the market more,especially Asia, which is a very diverse market.

People change a lot and they change fast; and change is very good for us. As the NEMs keep up with those changing demand scenarios, how wecan support them and help them on the implement side, and come up with asolution right on time—that is where the valueproposition comes. Wehave to provide flexibleT&M solutions for themin the R&D phase so thatthey can develop thosesolutions in a timelyfashion.

How do standardization issues in the telco industry affect the T&M market?
Certainly there's an impact to us. Because there are more technologies out there, we need to provide solutions for more standards and formats. We also need to make sure that we have the right solutions, at the right time when the customers need them. So time-to-market is really important for us; to monitor and work with our partners in coming out with thosetest solutions.

We are working day in and day out to make sure that we fill those requirements. That is our key valueproposition in this industry.

During the past year, the company has been doing a lot of M&As. Please give your comments.
It is actually one of our growth strategies—mergers and acquisitions. The other growth, which is organic growth, is by increasing the coverage of our productportfolio.

Apart from increasing our R&D footprint here in Asia, we will also continue to do collaborations with our partners in providing solutions for their needs, and look for opportunities everywhere and where appropriate, and we will engage with thoseoffers.