During Asia Tech x Singapore (ATxSG) 2023, Aaron Chan, Vice President, Pan Asia Sales, DZS, shared valuable insights into the offerings and strategies of the company. In the interview with Telecom Review Asia, Chan highlighted the unique position of DZS in the market as well as its global partnerships with operators to transform the access, subscriber, optical and cloud edge to advance digital transformation.
Can you provide an overview of DZS and its key offerings?
DZS stands out from a market perspective due to our unique, innovative solutions and extensive reach. We operate in a multicultural environment globally, but especially in Asia where our customer base spans various countries in this region. Increasingly, we are seeing that governments are collaborating with telecommunication companies to accelerate their digital and fiber transformation.
From an infrastructure perspective, this holds immense significance for the countries we engage with. Across the APAC region, we play a pivotal role by delivering world-class network edge solutions and substantial value to address the challenges faced by operators. Our areas of specialization include the access edge, optical edge, cloud edge and subscriber edge where we offer significant benefits to our customers, enabling them to transform, grow, and thrive while delivering the ultimate broadband subscriber experience.
What are the main industries or sectors that DZS's solutions cater to? Are there any unique challenges or requirements within these industries that the company addresses?
We are service provider-centric, having established partnerships with many tier-one operators across the globe and throughout Asia. In addition to catering both to residential broadband and the enterprise market, which includes networking solutions for hospitality, retail, multi-dwelling units and education, we have positioned ourselves through software to strategically meet the myriad business needs of service providers serving these markets to provide optimal WiFi experiences, service assurance, and orchestration and automation to optimized service provider OPEX and CAPEX.
Catering to these different sectors presents unique opportunities for DZS as we help all of our customers gain a competitive edge in their respective markets through high performance, fast and agile deployments, and comprehensive solutions that address their needs across their network and existing network ecosystem.
Moreover, our focus extends beyond merely providing solutions. We actively engage with our customers, collaborating closely with them to tackle challenges and overcome pain points. This approach not only strengthens our strategic partnerships but also facilitates accelerated growth across the regions where we operate.
Can you highlight any partnerships or collaborations in the region and how they accelerate digital transformation?
We maintain two distinct sets of partners in our operations. Firstly, we have local partners who actively engage with us daily to efficiently manage our extensive base of service providers as well as enterprises operating across various industries.
These partners tend to be experts in very specific parts of the broadband industry. Our collaboration with these experienced local service providers has often spanned many years, fostering a strong and trusted relationship. This deep connection allows us to effectively address the requirements of operators, and we have found this business model to be particularly successful.
Secondly, we actively engage with global partners who also possess a wealth of expertise in their respective fields, but are geared more toward major tier-one operators. For example, we work with multiple global OpenRAN technology leaders in the industry. DZS technology complements these global partners, many of whom focus on enabling large mobile operators, for example, to move to an open, multi-vendor RAN vendor ecosystem that provides a lower total cost of ownership and greater flexibility.
Across both our fiber-to-the-home or business and 5G customers, there is an accelerating need for improved bandwidth, lower latency networks, and data intelligence and insights that inspire machine learning, higher performance, better experiences, and automated services. Across all of our partnerships, we have instilled a common vision and cultivated a synergy that enables us to help our customers gain a competitive edge, and continue to maintain that edge as requirements and market conditions evolve.
How does the company ensure the scalability and flexibility of its solutions to meet the evolving needs of clients?
We have a very strong team located in the APAC region, with our regional headquarters based in Korea. We also have a very strong team in the US market (where DZS is globally headquartered), as well as the European and Middle East regions. This global footprint contributes to our comprehensive understanding of customer behavior, cultural nuances, and emerging technology needs in these markets. We value this global perspective and believe that it makes us sensitive to needs as they are emerging around the world and react by architecting solutions ready for the scalability and flexibility challenges of tomorrow.
We are also very focused on global standards bodies like the Broadband Forum, O-RAN Alliance, PURPL and a variety of others. As a major contributor to these bodies, we are ensuring that our standards-based products meet interoperability requirements and align with operators' long-term strategies.
We are very confident that our access, optical, subscriber and cloud edge solutions offer industry-best flexibility and scalability. In addition to innovative architectures that are non-blocking, temperature hardened for ease of deployment, and modular to grow as fast or slow as a service provider wants to deploy, our software makes our customers extraordinarily agile and efficient, allowing our customers to not only get to market faster in their deployments and their launch of new services, but provide powerful service assurance and operational responsiveness. We help our customers to become the leading broadband service providers in their markets, and maintain their competitive edge through innovation, intelligence, and unprecedented agility.
