Former Cisco executive and current Casa Systems CEO Michael Glickman is betting a renewed engineering and product focus will help the beleaguered vendor rebuild its foundation after what has been a traumatic 2023.

Glickman was tapped as CEO in mid-July, having previously spent more than 21 years at Cisco where he last held an SVP title for Cisco’s global service provider segment. Glickman most recently spent two-and-a-half years as president at PacketFabric. Shortly after his arrival at Casa Systems, he brought on former Cisco executive Colin Kincaid as the vendor's new chief product officer.

Glickman stepped into a tenuous situation at Casa Systems.

The vendor entered the year on a high, having used its operational strength to draw a significant investment from long-time customer Verizon. That $140 million investment included Verizon acquiring a nearly 10% stake in Casa Systems and a purchasing agreement valued at up to $140 million over the entire term.

Adam Koeppe, SVP for technology strategy and planning at Verizon, said at the time that the carrier was going to plow Casa System’s cloud-native 5G core platform into the carrier’s private network efforts. He explained that Verizon would use Casa Systems’ platform to deploy a 5G core or mobile edge computing (MEC) system onto just about any infrastructure environment an enterprise customer might be running. This includes a customer’s private cloud or on-premises bare-metal system.

“When we look at new functions that are coming onto our core network, our 5G core capabilities are all cloud native,” Koeppe told SDxCentral. “So it was really important for us to ensure that Casa provides us with the solutions that we’re working with them on are all cloud native so they fit right into our architecture very seamlessly, and the private network with MEC is a tremendous growth area.”

However, Casa Systems’ year went sideways in mid-March when President and CEO Jerry Guo abruptly announced plans to resign from those two positions. Guo’s decision was announced as part of the vendor’s fourth-quarter and full-year 2022 earnings release, which showed a significant drop in full-year revenues and net income plunging from a return of $3.2 million in 2021, to a loss of $79.2 million for 2022.

The news sent Casa Systems’ stock down more than 45% to around $1 per share.

Glickman told SDxCentral that he took on the leadership role at Casa Systems because of the vendor’s strong engineering team and overall reputation.

“I can remember competing against Casa in the past and the things that I always heard from those customers, and now that I have visited all of our major customers around the world over my first 90 days, really resonates, which is an incredibly strong engineering team, very innovative and also very nimble,” Glickman said.

“We are very much willing to work with customers to try to find solutions on how they want to use our technology. And those are great things. Those are foundational, in my experience, to a great technology company.”

Casa Systems’ technology portfolio is highlighted by the vendor’s work with Verizon and cable providers. This includes virtualized network functions (VNFs) that are cloud-native applications designed to work in virtualized environments and Casa Systems’ virtualized converged cable access platform (vCCAP).

Glickman said this platform allows Casa Systems to target wireless service providers and cable providers, which are core focus areas for the vendor.

“If you think about the convergence that is going on between the two, I get the question all the time: Are you going to be focused on the cable industry? Are you gonna be focused on the telco and wireless industry? And my answer is, I am not sure you're going to see much difference between the two in a lot of ways moving forward because there's a lot of convergence going on around access technologies,” Glickman said.

“Whether it's fiber-to-the-home (FTTH), the DOCSIS (data over cable service interface specification) infrastructure, fixed-wireless access (FWA), my sense is that all are utilizing all of these different technologies," he said. "So it's incumbent on us to use these virtualized network functions to help them to do that much more efficiently.”

The vendor is starting to make some progress.

Casa Systems in September struck a deal with regional wireless carrier UScellular to provide its AurusLINK FWA outdoor modem to support the carrier’s FWA business. The device allows UScellular customers to self-install the modem in an outdoor location that can receive a signal from UScellular’s network to provide Wi-Fi connectivity within a home.

Glickman said that arrangement was based on Casa Systems’ software within that hardware and highlights Casa Systems’ ability to tap its hardware products to differentiate itself in the market “over a commodity device.”

“I think there's still value there and you can start also thinking about how you utilize that device end-to-end so you can put the core of your network to support new applications,” Glickman said. “They do fit together and it depends on how the carrier plans on deploying between their core and their actual access device. But where there's differentiation, I think you'll see us continue to focus.”

Investors continue to be leery of Casa Systems’ potential. The vendor’s stock price has slowly sagged since its former CEO and president abruptly left in mid-March, ending last week at just 46 cents per share.

Glickman noted that the vendor was working toward more financial stability, highlighting that it has been able to pay down about $100 million of its long-term debt position, which now sits at around $180 million. This focus will continue into next year as Casa Systems continues to narrow its focus into areas where it sees revenue-generating opportunities that will allow it to further solidify its financial position.

“The good news is we do have a really strong platform, which enables us to continue to get really good support both from our equity investors as well as our lenders,” Glickman said.