Among consolidators in telecom, Zhone Technologies has proven to have among the most voracious appetites. The Alameda, Calif.-based company has acquired more than a dozen companies since inception, most recently Paradyne. At the same time, it has been criticized by some analysts for bringing together seemingly disparate technology pieces but not offering a comprehensive vision of its future. Mory Ejabat, CEO of Zhone, recently spoke with Telephony's Access Edge and let loose on vision and a number of other topics.

On the company's vision: We provide access platforms that can provide different services, but we do it in a media-agnostic way. [The carrier customer] selects what they want to use and we give them the right product for that. Some of those products come from acquisitions; some don't. If you want a pure DSLAM product, we've got that. If you want to offer gigE service we'll provide our Gigamux. All this is allowing service providers to provide different services. We always try to make the pipe bigger so you can charge more for it. At the end of the day, if you're going to run different functions you need a huge pipe and you're going to pay for that pipe. We are going to add functionality that enhances our gross margins.

On that vision shifting: Time changes and you have to re-engineer your company as time changes. Post 2001, carriers didn't want to invest in next-generation equipment. Two years ago, no one was talking about IPTV or voice over IP. Now carriers are spending money on fatter pipes, new technology and that's why we've started introducing our new products. We did sell two legacy businesses from the Paradyne acquisition. Veralink bought one, and the other piece went to CTDI.

On competing for the Bell companies' GPON RFP: We have a product that is a BPON and in the next few months will be GPON. We got burned when they came out with the RFP for the next-generation fiber-to-the-prem project. We spent a lot of time and money, and at the end of the day they gave it to their existing vendors and said, 'here, make us a system that looks like this.' They're going to do the same thing on GPON. I can guarantee they're not going select anyone new. Dealing with RBOCs isn't worth it in that respect.

On partnering with larger vendors: It may give us some advantages, but I don't see any good partners for us at this point. I don't see us partnering with Lucent, Nortel or Siemens. I may be naïve on that but given that Calix won the deal with Sprint because of Nortel, I don't see an advantage. I don't think that [Calix-Nortel] relationship is going to last long. Would I want to partner with someone like Cisco? Probably, but we haven't really started to look at it.

On the Paradyne acquisition: "What we have done so far is changed the name just a bit. We're going to keep Paradyne by Zhone for the foreseeable future. On the technology part, Paradyne can go as far as high-bandwidth DSL. It doesn't provide TDM or ATM-to-packet migration. The [Multi Access Line Concentrator] is becoming the de facto standard on those accounts that Pardyne has. It's both large and small independents. They're using Paradyne as a DSLAM, but they're using us as the next-generation [broadband loop carrier]. One of the attractions of the acquisition was having both products.

On selling to wireless carriers: We're not going to wireless access. But using Ethernet extend, we're using it for wireless backhaul. We are getting some traction with smaller telcos. Probably next year, we'll push that technology more as it become more standard and stable.