Casa Systems announced the appointment of Colin Kincaid, former Cisco CTO, as the company's new chief product officer (CPO). During his tenure as CTO for Cisco’s Global Service Provider Business, he led the overall solutions architecture, go-to-market and technical teams in businesses spanning over $14 billion in revenues across products, services and partners.
Casa’s C-suite transformation
In March, just days following the departure of former CEO, President, and Founder Jerry Guo, Casa Systems’ (NASDAQ: CASA) stock took a significant dive, which it has not recovered from. Casa’s stock has fallen 76.69% in the past year; today it is valued at $0.86, according to NASDAQ. In this quarter alone, the company’s net profit margin is down 274.03%, while net income is down 206.26%.
Enter Michael Glickman. The current president and CEO of Casa joined the company in August, inheriting his position from interim CEO Ed Durkin. Glickman, an industry veteran, spent over 20 years as a Cisco executive, most recently serving as SVP for the company’s Global Service Provider segment.
In a statement regarding Kincaid, Glickman said, "As we look to the next phase of growth at Casa Systems, Colin is the right leader with a real passion for customer-driven innovation and an impressive track record of successfully translating market and technology trends into building market-leading products for global communication service provider customers and leading highly effective, global teams."
Jeff Heynen, VP for broadband access and home networking research at Dell'Oro, previously told Silverlinings he believes Casa was shifting from cable solutions "more of a mobile core type play." Following the success of Casa’s competitor Harmonic, Heynen predicted that Casa would look for talent experienced in dealing with mobile operators.
Referring to the company's stock price drop, he noted, “We have to be careful when saying that the drop in revenue was a result of Mr. Guo’s departure from the company. That was somewhat coincidental — the shift incident for cable operators was already underway at that point. In the infrastructure space right now there’s a significant amount of change that [service providers] are all having to deal with whether it be fiber spending or transitioning to distributed access architectures.”
Currently, Casa is gaining footholds with products like mobile core, virtual broadband network gateways, and fixed wireless devices, despite reduced demand for cable. According to Heynen the company has the necessary products and a strong installed base to capitalize on, but how this transition is executed will determine the company’s success going forward.
At the time of publication, Casa’s stock was trading at $0.87, down 2.86% on the day.