In an interview with Insights Success, the CEO and President of Keysight Technologies, Ron Nersesian, shares his key insights on various aspects of the company and how it contributes towards the industry by offering cutting edge solutions and services. He also discusses Keysight’s attainments and future endeavors.
Below are the highlights from the interview conducted between Ron and Insights Success:
Give a brief overview of your organization, its mission and vision?
Keysight provides world-class electronic measurement capabilities to accelerate technology innovations that make the world more productive and a safer place to live. We offer an unmatched breadth and depth of measurement tools and expertise to meet the world’s critical requirements for electronic measurement. Keysight develops solutions that help bring electronic products to market faster from design simulation, to prototype validation, to manufacturing test, to optimization in networks and cloud environments. Our customers span the worldwide communications ecosystem, aerospace and defense, automotive and energy, semiconductor and general electronics end markets.
What are the cutting-edge products/solutions offered by Keysight Technologies?
Keysight is at the heart of innovation processes in key end markets and emerging technology trends such as 5G, connected and autonomous vehicles, E-Mobility, IoT, and high-speed datacenters. Innovations like these require considerable technology reinvention. That’s why at Keysight, we are innovating the invention process by streamlining workflows for software and hardware designers. As the market leading test and measurement company in the world, we offer end-to-end test equipment, solutions, and services to help design, validate, manufacture, and optimize these innovations. Wherever the signal goes, Keysight is there to accelerate development lifecycles.
We see a lot of exciting growth areas across many markets. Let’s start with the promise of 5G. Like what the market experienced in 3G and 4G usage growth, 5G promises to connect over a billion new devices. That alone is exciting, but even more exciting is the attributes of those devices. Intermixed with more standard users will be billions of IoT devices each communicating small amounts of data, virtual and augmented reality systems requiring very fast connections, and connected cars moving at highway speeds.
Getting there requires use of complex technologies such as millimeter wave frequencies for commercial communication along with dense waveform modulations, massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna techniques, and antenna beam-forming, just to name a few. To test all this, we not only need to extend the capabilities of individual test platforms, but to build entire system solutions aimed at validating specific 5G design implementations.
Keysight partners across the 5G ecosystem, including chipset makers, device designers, network equipment manufacturers, and service providers. We create tests to validate designs of individual features, specific products, or end-to-end networks. There are plenty of exciting technology challenges to go around in every part of the 5G ecosystem as each part pushes the boundaries of technical innovation.
In terms of automotive, our customers are pushing the boundaries in battery manufacturing, power conversion and power loading in e-Mobility. They are also innovating longer range, higher-resolution radar and LIDAR sensors for autonomous driving and integrating e-Call services and broadening the data connections to make a truly connected car.
In IoT, we are seeing an evolution from ’best effort’ applications to more ’mission critical’ applications that require higher reliability and more secure wireless connections. In data centers, we constantly see improvements in data connection speeds which now top 400 Gbps requiring a new generation of transceivers. In aerospace and defense, of course, our customers are always pushing the boundaries in sensors and communications.
Describe the experiences or achievements that have shaped the journey of the company.
I would say our biggest achievement was the rapid transformation from hardware-centric products to software centric solutions. We realized that at each stage of development – design simulation, prototype validation, and production optimization – different teams create their own test parameters and analysis points. Traditionally, design simulation software tends to operate independently from prototype validation lab systems, which tend to operate independently from production test systems. With Keysight’s software platform, PathWave, design, test and analysis work from each stage can be shared with the next. This not only improves the design but saves a lot of time used to reinvent tests typical in most developments.
PathWave allows our customers to accelerate innovation and product development from concept through manufacturing and deployment. It’s the industry’s first software platform to integrate design, test, measurement and analysis in a completely programmable environment. It combines design software, instrument control, and application specific test software in an open development environment allowing users to create high-performance solutions fast.
Keysight’s strong products combined with its talented employees and culture makes me incredibly excited for what the future holds, not only for our company but also for the technologies that advance the world.
What influence over the company have you had as the CEO?
I feel strongly that customers think in terms of finding solutions to their unique business and technical problems. They don’t think in terms of products to purchase. We transformed the company to address real-world business requirements in our customers’ target industries to deliver integrated solutions. This entailed a major transformation in how we were structured, how we engaged with customers, and in our go-to- market strategy.
For example, in the past, we were organized around our products and internal capabilities. We shifted that to reflect the focus on our customers end ecosystems. This has allowed us to think about our customers first, about solving their challenges, and getting them to market faster.
And for those customers who need expert assistance or want to outsource test altogether, we offer multiple services, including test-as-a-service locations around the world. The number of early engagements and partnerships we have forged with market-maker companies demonstrates that this strategy is working for us and for our customers.
Does having an ethical approach affect your business strategies or growth of your company?
Absolutely, at the highest level, our standards of business conduct, which every employee receives annual training on, provide a guidepost for managing our ethical governance across the company. From there, our environmental policies, employee benefits and diversity, responsible sourcing efforts, community philanthropy and volunteerism, as well as our solutions, support an end-to-end ethical workplace at Keysight.
From individual employee responsibilities through corporate governance, our strategic and operational business management policies, procedures, and values provide operational transparency and business sustainability while meeting compliance requirements.
I view this approach as having a direct impact on our incredible growth. We enable faster acquisition integration and new market entry through consistent programs and policies that meet global regulations and requirements across the company. We support employee hiring and development in growth areas, with future engineer development, employee diversity and benefits that also include philanthropy, volunteerism, STEM programs in elementary, middle, and high schools, and university relations in support of future workforce development. University research grants and engagements ensure we are positioned well for innovation. In addition, our remarketing solutions and used product sales through product quality and take-back programs support environmental sustainability while offering new revenue streams.
How do you plan to sustain the ethical nature of your organization in the near future?
Well, quite simply, to keep doing what we have been doing through our entrepreneurial and continuous improvement mindset. For 80 years as of January 2019 – first as part of Hewlett-Packard, then Agilent, and now Keysight, we have acknowledged our responsibility to deliver through ethical governance practices and help address global social and environmental challenges. Beyond just being the right thing to do, it is part of our company DNA going back to HP founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard.
Our Keysight Leadership Model – which defines how the company continuously delivers greater value to customers, shareholders, and employees – has the same defined value set of social responsibility, accountability and uncompromising integrity. It is the philosophy that permeates every aspect of our operations and drives our innovation, speed, and excellence in execution.
Beyond that, we support a continuous improvement mentality. So, while we will continue to do the great things we have always done, it is our mindset to improve wherever we can. From our Corporate Social Responsibility program that monitors opportunities in these areas, to every employee that looks to their own roles and functions for how to do things better through operational excellence and innovation.
