The Brazilian unit of Tellabs Inc. (NASDAQ: TLAB), a company that has been focused on the telecommunications market, is looking to expand beyond that market, as Fernando Capella, Tellabs Brazil sales director, told RCR Wireless News, during Ciab—a conference and exposition focused on IT for financial institutions (check all stories) held in São Paulo on June 20-22.
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The goal, he said, is to have the corporate market represent between 5% to 10% of Tellabs’ total revenue from Brazil by the end of this year. “We noticed there is a share of large companies that require optical transport network solutions,” Capella said. The target for 2013 is to achieve an even higher share with the corporate market accounting for 20% of the company’s total Brazilian revenue.
According to Capella, Tellabs is focusing on several main verticals: financial institutions, utilities, government agencies and ISPs (Internet Service Providers). The company will reach the corporate market through partners, including PromonLogicalis. Currently, Tellabs sells directly to carriers among other telecom customers.
However, even though it has been a vendor for the telecom segment for years, Tellabs might face difficulties entering the enterprise vertical. Among the greatest challenges are becoming known to new clients and identifying what they need—because not all companies’ and organizations’ needs are similar to the needs of telecoms. “But we notice that corporations begin to build their own networks, and this is an opportunity for us,” he said.
Banco Mercantil
As a result of this new approach, Tellabs recently announced that the financial institution Banco Mercantil do Brasil chose Tellabs equipment to support the upgrade and expansion of its independent network to meet demand for fast, reliable, low-latency networks for stock transactions and online banking.
By deploying the Tellabs 7100 series, Banco Mercantil do Brasil aimed to have a reliable network with redundancy and low latency.
Brazilian operations
Last September, during the Futurecom event in São Paulo, Alberto Barriento, Tellabs VP and general manager for Latin America, commented that the company’s growth across the region was driven by optical, mobile backhaul and carrier Ethernet solutions. “They help to address the huge demand for data that we are seeing nowadays,” said Barriento, during an interview (watch the video).
However, worldwide Tellabs revealed plans to cut 530 jobs as part of cost-cutting plans after reporting a steep drop in fourth quarter revenue in 2011, falling from $410 million in 2010 to $317 million in 2011 for the same time period. The job cuts will impact its facilities in Petaluma, Calif.; Vancouver, Canada; Bangalore, India; and Karachi, Pakistan.
