Company CEO Amir Zoufonoun says Exalt's mission is to be a one-stop shop for microwave backhaul.

by Jeff Goldman [February 25, 2009]

Exalt Communications was founded in 2004 by company CEO Amir Zoufonoun, who boasts over 29 years of experience in the wireless industry, including 10 years at Harris and Farinon and 13 years at Western Multiplex until its merger with Proxim Wireless in 2002.

Zoufonoun says he was inspired to start the new company in response to two key changes in the market. "The shift toward IP from TDM was finally happening on the backhaul side in a big way, and people were no longer talking about adding another T-1 or E-1—they were talking about hundreds of megabits of bandwidth being required at the edge of the network," he says.

To meet that growing need, Zoufonoun says, Exalt went to market in 2006 with a high capacity microwave backhaul solution which now boasts over 400 customers. "We've been selling to carriers, to ISPs, to enterprises, to all sorts of segments," he says. "3G and 4G are definitely driving carriers toward upgrading their networks in a way that they've never done in the past."

Exalt Communications 580 Division Street Campbell, CA 95008 Toll Free: (888) 91-EXALT Fax: (408) 871-9750 Web contact page

The point, Zoufonoun says, is that leased lines will never match microwave in terms of scalability. "Carriers are spending about $20 billion around the world on leased line backhaul, but it's not scalable," he says. "At the same time, microwave has reached the point that now, within a few months, you can pay for it and own the connection, at very high speeds."

A flexible product line
Zoufonoun says Exalt's mission is to be a one-stop shop for microwave backhaul, in all geographies, and for everyone from colleges and universities to service providers. "The market is pretty big—it's $5.7 billion today—but at the same time, it's fragmented, so there is room for an innovative company to come in and lead the way from a technology standpoint," he says.

Towards that end, Zoufonoun says, all of the company's products natively support both TDM and Ethernet, and are available in all-indoor, all-outdoor, and split-mount configurations in frequencies ranging from 2 GHz to 40 GHz. "Our sandbox goes up to 100 GHz, so over time we'll have all the frequencies, but the majority of connections to date have been in the bands from 2 GHz to 40 GHz," he says.

The all-outdoor configuration, Zoufonoun notes, appeals to a class of users that "wants to put these things on a pole or a rooftop and forget about it—typically, ISPs fall into this category," he says. "They like the highly integrated unit, power over Ethernet. You just have a single cable coming down that goes into a switch or a router—that's the one that we sell to ISPs quite a bit."

In order to maximize flexibility, Zoufonoun says, the company uses a firmware-defined radio platform. "Lots of features and settings in these radios can be [changed] remotely through the Internet, so truck rolls are minimized. The idea is to have a universal approach, so that from a customer standpoint, you can remove all the objections that typically you find in selling situations," he says. "We don't have any technology religion—we know customers do, so we let them basically decide what they like."

Pricing and support
Pricing for the products, Zoufonoun says, is generally similar to that of Exalt's competitors. "We don't undersell, and we don't try to win with price, necessarily. We don't want to erode the market, and at the same time, we're not charging a lot of premium for what we offer, because we don't want to create any pain points for the customer," he says.

The company offers a standard two-year warranty on all products, and Zoufonoun says Exalt takes great pride in its support personnel. "We feel that when a customer is in trouble, we just need to drop everything and get on their problem and solve it. Typically, somebody who gets on the phone [for us] has, minimum, 15 to 20 years of experience in microwave radio, so they can solve just about any problem," he says.

Ultimately, Zoufonoun says, Exalt's greatest strength may well come down to its recent arrival in the marketplace. "We had a clean sheet of paper back in the '04 or '05 timeframe. We have the latest platform in the world as far as we know," he says. "So we had this luxury of being the latest to the game. We knew the shortcomings of some of the other products out there, and we took care to make sure that we don't have those shortcomings."

Zoufonoun says the company continues to add new features to its products on a regular basis. "We continue to innovate on the firmware front, and we can download these features remotely into the devices, so when the radios ship, it's not the end of their growth—it's the beginning of their growth," he says. "You can add more to them, and they can continue to grow as the customer's needs change and grow."

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