Interview with Steve Karandais, Keysight Technologies

The separation of Keysight from the rest of Agilent has reinvigorated the test and measurement company.

“I’m an extreme technologist,” says Steve Karandais. “I still love understanding all the technology and getting right into it.” This is just the right attitude to have when you’re the general manager of the Australian division of one of the world’s foremost electronics companies, Keysight Technologies.

The global business is headquartered in Santa Rosa, an hour north of San Francisco, where its main microwave engineering, research, development and manufacturing facility is located. The Australian arm is based in Melbourne, where it has a full NATA (National Association of Testing Authorities) accredited calibration lab. It’s the oldest such lab in Australia, having been continuously accredited since 1974.

Karandais brings several decades of technical and sales experience to the job. “I was in the Air Force as a radtech many years ago, and then joined Hewlett-Packard in 1989 in the cal lab,” says Karandais. “I was in calibration and repair for six and a half years as the senior microwave engineer in the service centre, so I got a really good grounding in all our instruments; I really knew them from the inside out.

“We then formed a technical consulting group, part of our call centre, where customers would call in saying, ‘Look, I’ve got this job I need to do but I don’t know what kind of test equipment I need; all I know is I’ve got to measure these things,’” he says. “And we would help figure out exactly what kind of equipment they needed, what kind of specs they needed.”

From there he moved into sales in the late 1990s and was the company’s Defence account manager, a role he held for about 12 years.

“My job has always been diagnostician,” says Karandais. “When I was in the Air Force, I had to fault-find HF and communications systems; I worked on the air traffic control tower at Pt Cook. It’s always been ‘What is the problem? How do we get down to it, how do figure out what it is, and let’s solve it.’ And I approach sales in the same way.

“In the period of time when I was sitting on the phone helping people figure out ‘What are we trying to solve here? What measurement is going to complete this solution?’, I found that that’s all I needed to do,” he says. “It is problem solving. And that takes really active listening, understanding what the customer is trying to do, and that relies on the customer being confident and trusting you with that information.”

Karandais says that consultative technique stood him in good stead for 12 years as Defence account manager, then as sales manager and now as general manager of the company. “Even though I don’t need to apply my technical knowledge [day to day], I still need to have it to understand what’s going on,” he says.

The separation

Until late last year, Keysight Technologies was one half of Agilent Technologies — a blend of test and measurement and biotech. I ask Karandais about the reasoning behind splitting the company in two.

“The separation occurred [for reasons] very similar to the HP days,” he says. “Back in the HP days, coming up to 1999 where Agilent split from HP, they [HP] had made a decision that they wanted to be a pure IT company. The cost model for a computer company is that they put between 2 and 3% of revenue back into R&D. For a test and measurement company, we need between 12 and 15% of revenue back into R&D to come up with the next leading-edge capabilities.

“Coming up to the last five years, the executive management was … struggling to figure out ‘Are we a measurements company or are we a biotech company?’” he says. “And realistically, about five years ago, they put us into the biotech category. And that meant that the test and measurement portion was suffering. A lot of the revenue and profit that was being developed from test and measurement was feeding the biotech portion of the organisation.

“So we really made a decision that we just had to separate, and, for the first time since about 1965, we’re a pure test and measurement company again.”

In the field

A major trend in the test and measurement field is the move from benchtop instruments to field-portable instruments. Keysight’s new FieldFox instrument is a good example and is a testament to the effort the company has put into R&D and design.

“We’ve developed the measurement science — how do you do spectrum analysis really, really well? How do you do network analysis really well?” Karandais says. “We’ve taken all that science, all those measurement algorithms, and, with new technology such as ASICs and MMICs, we can put all that measurement science into the chip. So we took our very best spectrum analysers, our very best network analysers and cable antenna test people, our power meter people, put them together and developed new ASICs, so that now [with FieldFox] in a 3 kg box, we’ve got a full 2-port VNA, a full spectrum analyser, we’ve got a tracking generator, independent source, a power meter, cable and antenna tester, an interference analyser, a 32 VDC source and GPS.

“It’s been amazingly popular — we’ve sold hundreds in Australia,” says Karandais. “And overall, we have 70% of the world market in network analysers.”

In addition to making and selling its own gear, Keysight also operates a calibration service for other manufacturers’ equipment. “About 40% of the work that comes in is not from our own company. We calibrate products from anybody pretty much,” says Karandais. “We have the widest accreditation for calibration of any company in Australia. We go from DC to 50 GHz, and we have more than 500 points of accreditation.

“We have the best measurement science in the world. We’ve been at this since 1939. So we’re a 75-year-old start-up company,” he jokes.

Building momentum

“One of the big changes that’s going to occur over the next three to five years is the move from 4G to 5G,” says Karandais. “5G will be working at much higher frequencies; probably a lot of it is going to be happening in the E band between 60 and 90 GHz.

“The idea will be that, just as we have femtocells now for 4G — because you can’t just have one big base station — it’ll be even more so for 5G,” he adds. “Attenuation of signals will occur much faster, so there’ll be whole lot more little cells around the place. Those cells will actually be beam-forming to an individual [subscriber].”

Getting back to the changes with Agilent and Keysight, I ask him about the feeling inside the company now. Is there a sense of reinvigoration?

“Definitely,” he says. “Right now we’re going through a number of internal restructures. We had the structure of Agilent Technologies, which was a $7bn company, and that involves certain levels of hierarchy and separation of responsibilities for different capabilities.

“As Keysight, that now needs to collapse,” he adds. “As a $3bn company we need to be much flatter. We need to have a lot more integration of our R&D organisations, and that’s happening right now. We’re integrating sales and marketing forces [for instance]. We’re really feeling there’s some momentum we can put into the organisation.

“We’ve just announced that we hope to be successful in acquiring a company at the end of October, which will give us more capability in the 5G space as well as some capability in the telco space that we’ve been lacking over the last few years,” Karandais says. “So we really do have a sense that our R&D money is just our R&D money, and it will be ploughed back into growing the capability of the company and moving us in the direction where we’re really going to take advantage of things like 5G.”

5G is obviously set firmly in Keysight’s crosshairs.

“The technology doesn’t have a standard, it doesn’t have a product, it doesn’t have any capability,” he says. “But it’s being researched and developed and we know it’s going to occur, so we’ve got the team already in place and already working with all the research universities and organisations such as Samsung and so on, and embedded in there, to make sure we understand what they need. So by the time the standard comes out, we’ll have the product. That’s our intention.

“Keysight and Agilent Technologies have always had people embedded in the standards bodies, always had a representative from our company in all the IEEE bodies, or the 3GPP bodies and so on,” he adds. “So we know what’s coming up, we know what people are looking for and we’re developing the capabilities to coincide with the need.”

I comment that just as the company seems very forward-looking and eager to stay on course with the latest trends and technologies, Karandais too seems to have the same approach to his work.

“I don’t think you need to stop learning. I still do the training and still go to training courses,” he says. “My biggest worry going into the role of general manager of Keysight has been ‘How am I going to let go of the technology?’ And I don’t think I can. Nor do I think I want to, because I still have very, very technical conversations with our customers, and I do joint visits now with our salespeople. And I tend to butt in and go, “Yes, but have you thought of…?” he says with a laugh.