With exciting times ahead following acquisition by Keysight, Ixia is stepping in with new intensity and big plans for the market. President Bethany Mayer talks on the new go-to market strategy; tech plans for future and offers advice for businesses dealing with issues with the Cloud technologies.
Q: Why was Ixia an attractive proposition for Keysight? How successful has the acquisition proven?
A: Ixia leads with technology. We have a massive patent portfolio for a small company, and we are consistently first to market. We are not the low price leader, and we never will be. We offer the best products on the market, and support our customers in whatever they need to ensure they are successful. Keysight saw that in Ixia and it was highly attractive to them, as that is in line with Keysight’s mission and culture. It is important for Keysight to add value to their customers by providing solutions to layer 1-7 testing and offering best in market products. Keysight is the market leader in their space. Ixia brings layer 1-7 technology and is the market leader in our space. This is a strong combination.
Q: Can you shed some light on Ixia’s future plans as part of Keysight?
A: Our goal is continued growth in our markets and delivering growth with profitability to Keysight. In addition we are moving into the Cloud with both our test and visibility products. This is an exciting time for Ixia and Keysight. We will go with the first to market, best in class technologies approach to the cloud and offer our customers solutions to help them migrate with performance and security to the cloud.
Q: What is the USP of Ixia against market competition in testing?
A: Our products are technically superior both in performance and in their ability to test complex protocol sets and with real world environments. Our Cloud Storm solution is unparalleled in its ability to test terabit speeds of SSL encrypted traffic.
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“We will go with the first to market, best in class technologies approach to the cloud and offer our customers solutions to help them migrate with performance and security to the cloud.”
Bethany Mayer
President
Ixia Solutions Group
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Q: What is the biggest cloud-related issue businesses are overlooking right now?
A: The issue that customers face now is how and what to migrate to the cloud. Once migrated, how to ensure performance and security of workloads and applications in the cloud.
Q: What risks are organizations exposing themselves to when they move applications to the public cloud?
A: Business continuity issues and security issues. Public cloud right now is not always as reliable as a customer’s data center. If there is an outage, depending upon the workloads in the cloud, it can pose a serious risk to the business. In addition, security of data is always a concern in the cloud, and there are not as many solutions as customers would like right now to solve that concern.
Q: What do organizations need to do to minimize those risks as they move applications to the cloud?
A: They need to stage what they move to the cloud in terms of importance and complexity. They also need to consider tools that can provide them with visibility into the traffic and workloads in the cloud to assure performance in the cloud.
Q: What is Ixia’s strategy around helping organizations move securely to the cloud?
A: Our strategy is two-fold: Offer test solutions that test the security and resiliency of their instances in the cloud, and provide scale out visibility tools that can enable a customer to assure the performance of their workloads in the cloud.
Q: What is your advice to the Enterprise IT World CXO community?
A: Developing a strategy together as a team, communicating it across the organization, aligning and staying in touch constantly with the leadership is the key to turning around a difficult situation. Broader communication on the progress of the turn around and transparency on the success factor is important. And finally, tie everyone in the company to the larger goal financially. We are in this boat together and we sink or swim together.
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