It didn't take long for Charlie Vogt to leave his stamp on Dasan Zhone Solutions.
About two weeks Vogt was named president and CEO of the telecom vendor, the Dasan Zhone brand – established by the merger of Dasan and Zhone in 2016 – will fade away as the company instead unifies as DZS and adds the tagline: "Enabling the Hyper-Connected World."
Under the new brand, DZS will also encompass the copper and fiber access technologies it gained from the 2018 acquisition of Germany-based Keymile.
"We believe that DZS better represents the innovation and promise of the combined and integrated companies in a way that 'Dasan Zhone' did not," Geoff Burke, the company's just-promoted chief marketing officer, said in a statement to Broadband World News and Light Reading.
Alongside the new brand, DZS also announced a new leadership team and more detail about its vision and direction under Vogt, who most recently was CEO of ATX Networks and, before that, headed up Imagine Communications and Genband (now Ribbon Communications).
Under the new plan, DZS will focus on four "technology pillars": 5G transport and connectivity; next-gen fiber access (including 10-Gig PON); passive optical LAN products for enterprises; and connected premises products.
As Vogt explained to Light Reading earlier this month, DZS will be looking to build on its presence in the Asia-Pacific by accelerating its business in North America, Latin America and the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region.
In addition to pursuing 5G stimulus programs globally, DZS will also look to get involved in the multi-billion-dollar Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF).
"The pursuit of the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund [is] something that we're going to be aggressively pursuing," Vogt said on the company's earnings call earlier this month. "There's pretty amazing players in the United States. I think there's a great opportunity for DZS to be successful in that particular market, especially with our fiber access platform."
In addition to making two recent hires – Jay Hilbert (late of Nokia, CommScope and Cambium) as EVP, America sales and Eric Mackey (formerly with HPE, Imagine Communications and Ribbon Communications) as VP of sales operations – DZS also announced a revised management team under Vogt:
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— Jeff Baumgartner, Senior Editor, Light Reading
