Azimuth Systems Records Continued Growth and Global Expansion in H1 of 2010

Azimuth Systems, Inc., a provider of wireless broadband test equipment and channel emulators, has reported growth and expansion in the first half of 2010.

Officials with Azimuth said that the company has experienced a more than 85 percent increase in bookings, tripled shipments for wireless channel emulators as compared to the first half of 2009, and expanded its customer base and international presence with the addition of LTE, WiMAX and 2G/3G customers worldwide.

Company officials said that the company's growth is largely a result of the success of Azimuth's ACE MX MIMO channel emulator in these key markets.

According to company officials, during its profitable first half of 2010, Azimuth expanded sales of wireless channel emulator systems for LTE, WiMAX and 2G/3G testing to wireless semiconductor, infrastructure and mobile equipment vendors, and service provider companies across North America, Europe and Asia, including Sequans Communications and ZTE.

The company also expanded operations in Europe, adding direct company resources in Sweden, Finland and France, and redistributed resources in Asia to provide additional focus on key industry accounts.

As a result, company officials said, Azimuth has experienced a 50 percent year-over-year increase in international sales.

Continuing its commitment to product innovation, the company in February 2010, launched Field-to-Lab (FTL) solution that allows dynamically-changing RF conditions collected by drive test tools to be replayed in the laboratory through the ACE MX MIMO channel emulator.

Azimuth was selected as the winner of the Wireless Test category through votes cast by the test and measurement community, defeating products from four other leading wireless test and measurement equipment companies.

In May 2010, Azimuth launched a series of beamforming seminars in China, Europe and North America to address the immediate need in China for TD-LTE beamforming solutions and extensions of this technology elsewhere for LTE and WiMAX networks.

Company officials said that the seminars explained beamforming, how it works, critical requirements for accurate lab-based testing, examples of typical test cases and results, and demonstrated Azimuth's approach to providing beamforming solutions across multiple antenna topologies such 4x4 and 8x2, and multiple radio technologies.

The strength of Azimuth's beamforming capabilities led to orders from two major TD-LTE infrastructure vendors, and additional seminars have already been scheduled for the second half of 2010.

“The rapid growth of 4G technologies has required investments in new test tools as the older ones are simply inadequate to address the complex MIMO and OFDMA needs of LTE and WiMAX. Azimuth has architected a wireless channel emulator specifically designed for advanced 4G testing, while including all of the backwards-compatible channel emulation features to test the current generation of 2G/3G cellular products, and the industry has clearly shown its support for our approach,” said Jim Iuliano, president and CEO of Azimuth Systems.

Iuliano said that the company looks forward to further market share expansion in 2010 – and beyond – as Azimuth continues to add new features to its market-leading ACE MX wireless channel emulator and to launch exciting, new products such as Azimuth's Field-to-Lab Solution.