What has been the impact of your restructuring? What is the current focus and strategy?
The reorganization of our company helps us deliver on our plan to be the customers’ first choice for innovative bandwidth-management solutions. We’ll do that by strengthening our customer intimacy, quickly delivering innovative products, and growing our international business. We have no debt, a strong balance sheet, and great relationship with major carriers.

How does Asia-Pacific fit into the restructuring map?
Asia-Pacific continues to be a growing market and Tellabs Asia Pacific is committed to meeting the needs of our customers by growing our staff to meet the demands in the market. This was also an opportunity for us to align our strengths to the requirements of our customers.

How important are services for the company?
The services front is one of the key contributors to Tellabs, and carriers today expect strong support from the manufacturers through each phase of the network cycle. In Asia-Pacific, we are seeing an increasing number of cases where telecom operators want to buy from Tellabs, for both equipment and turnkey engineering services, for
network rollout and maintenance during operations. Operators want equipment suppliers to provide strong support from network rollout through operations and maintenance as well as phasing out and replacing old equipment.

What has been your products and services strategy for the region?
Service providers want to see delivery of higher bandwidth services at a lower cost by achieving better network efficiencies. That is why Tellabs solutions cover the edge and core of the network, and come up with integrated network and service management functionalities. The aim is to introduce enhancements that will help provide new services more quickly and easily, offer enhanced Ethernet services, and cut operating and capital cost.

Which have been the most promising markets for you during the downturn?
Thailand, Malaysia, China, and India are promising markets for Tellabs. We have achieved several success stories in these countries.

What are the new products and services that you have added in the last 2–3 quarters?
We have added Ethernet over SDH to the Tellabs 6300 managed transport system to meet carriers’ data needs today, and migrate to their dynamic bandwidth management needs of tomorrow. We have added Ethernet switching unit (ESU) to the Tellabs 8100 managed access system that enables carriers to add data to their networks and lower their data transport costs by up to 50 percent.

What is your reading of the current market conditions?
The telecom industry, according to a market-research company, continues to undergo change. For the market bounce back in the US, the following things may happen—consolidation among carriers and equipment makers, as the market can not support the number of providers we have today; and regulatory changes to move from the quasi-regulated, quasi-competitive state.

Ch Srinivas Rao