Friday, September 12, 2008

Azimuth is tuned into RF test opportunities

By Efrain Viscarolasaga

There was a time when Acton-based Azimuth Systems Inc. was known for one thing — testing wi-fi networks. But over the past year, the company has gone through a change, expanding its product portfolio into radio frequency (RF) emulation.

The move puts the 60-person company into a larger market, and with a new European distributor announced this week and a place in Sprint Nextel Corp.’s WiMAX rollout, the strategy is starting to pay dividends.

To the uninitiated, the move from wi-fi testing to RF testing may seem subtle, but all wireless standards are not created equal. The RF spectrum includes technologies based on wireless broadband standards like WiMAX and LTE, that are targeted at a much broader scale, opening a market that includes wireless carriers, handset makers and electronics developers. But it also brings more risk.

“In the wireless testing area, you always have to be ahead of the standards and be a little visionary in placing your bets,” said Lou Volpe, a general partner at Kodiak Venture Partners and member of Azimuth’s board of directors. “(Azimuth) has done a very good job at that.”

The move into RF testing wasn’t sudden. Over the past year, the company has grown by 40 percent and reached profitability, predominantly on the back of its wi-fi business. But along the way, engineering resources were gradually shifted, a new executive team was put in place, and new products were unveiled.

According to CEO Jim Iuliano, who took the place of the departing Ray Cronin in December 2006 as the company closed its most recent round of funding ($7.5 million), 80 percent of the company’s engineering staff has been shifted to the RF side.

“We can get good profitability from wi-fi, but we can’t really grow with it. The cellular/RF opportunity is 100 times bigger than in wi-fi,” he said.

The company released its first RF testing product — for WiMAX — in early 2007, and has continued to update that platform along with developing new products for fixed mobile convergence and LTE, the next generation, wireless broadband standard for GSM.

Azimuth counts both Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and Sprint Nextel among its WiMAX testing customers and is adding more as the broadband wireless standard gains momentum, said officials. According to a report by Arizona research firm Forward Concepts Co., more than 200 network operators are in the process of deploying WiMAX equipment, while dozens of other manufacturers are developing products for the protocol. According to another research firm, California’s Infonetics Research, the worldwide WiMAX equipment industry could reach $7.7 billion by 2011, up from just under $700 million in 2007.