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No sooner did we get used to calling Harris Stratex by its newer name of Aviat, than it is going back into the past again. It's not actually changing its name back, but in other respects, it plans to return to its core microwave backhaul business. This will see it leaving behind many of the new directions that spurred it to adopt a new brand, and returning to its product roots, and even its former CEO, Chuck Kissner.

For the past couple of years, Aviat has been reshaped quite radically under the CEOship of Harald Braun. In particular, Braun wanted to build an end-to-end business encompassing the backhaul expertise, but also building on this to gain access deals, especially in WiMAXA, and to reach into higher value services contracts. But last summer, Braun was replaced by the returning Kissner, who wants to defocus on those new activities - where Aviat had to compete with established OEM giants - and get back to backhaul.

As ConnectedPlanet points out, the main focus of Aviat's Barcelona presence will be the latest radio in the well known Eclipse microwave range. In an interview with the paper, Kissner made it clear he thought that actions such as buying WiMAX vendor Telsima had distracted Aviat from its core business and lost it market share. "The original concept was to take our strength and backhaul and build from it, but the problem was that you had to maintain our strength in backhaul to do it," he said in the interview. "We took our eyes off the ball."

The priority now is to refresh Eclipse and introduce an all-outdoor IP unit called WTM 3000, targeted at small footprint 4G deployments. The latest Eclipse radio, the IDU GE3, will be a compact indoor unit designed to feed LTE and WIMAX sites with up to 400Mbps of capacity.

This is a crowded market though, and most players are introducing similar designs, especially in the all-outdoor field - DragonWave, NEC and others. According to a recent report from researchers at Infonetics, Aviat lost its number one spot in microwave backhaul and lost share to Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia Siemens and NEC, who made up the top four in the third quarter of 2010. But no player had more than 20% share of this fragmented space.

Kissner insists he will retain the new product lines and support key customers, particularly BSNL in India, which uses the WiMAX kit acquired with Telsima.

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