The CEO Forum Group Magazine Business 2023 (1) - Flipbook - Page 61
President & CEO, Calix
Robert Reiss: Calix is interesting because it is one
of the most innovative companies I have spoken
to, yet many people have frankly not heard about
you. Talk about the Calix business model.
Michael Weening: I hear that a lot, Robert. We
recently had a new board member who came from the
cloud company Indeed. As we were interviewing him
to join the board, his feedback was, “How is it that I
don’t know about your company? You’re right in the
middle of Silicon Valley and you’ve been around for
24 years. Calix is the most innovative and interesting
cloud company that I have never heard of.”
Who are we as a company? Our founder is Carl Russo,
and this is his third multibillion-dollar company. He
sold his last company for $7 billion in 1999. Over
the past 24 years, we built our company to the point
where we now support 1,800+ broadband providers
in the rural United States and Canada.
We initially started Calix as a network hardware
company. But over the last 12 years, we transformed
into a broadband software and cloud platform
company. The power of a platform model is that we
can serve broadband service providers of all sizes on a
The CEO Forum Group
has selected Michael
Weening, President
& CEO, Calix, for the
Transformative CEO Award as The Top 10
Businesses in America, 2023 in the category
of Innovation. This has been bestowed
for their visionary model of pioneering
culture, flexibility in work and innovating
breakthrough products and services that can
elevate the fabric of American society.
single platform. So that would include companies like
Verizon, which sole-sourced their next-generation
fiber network to us, to far smaller companies like
Cedar Falls Utility in Cedar Falls, Iowa, which has
about 10,000 subscribers.
Our transformation was all about enabling the
success of our customers. At this point, any customer
who invests in a partnership with Calix can now
transform their business in three ways.
www.theceoforumgroup.com The CEO Forum 59