The Case for Consultative Network-Building

Casey Inman, Director Sales & Marketing and Chad Lamb, Principal Solutions Architect, joined JSA at ITW 2025 to discuss how a consultative approach helps customers design their networks, why a zero licensing fee model matters, and how some recent product innovations—the DAT100 and fiber Patch Panel — are creating scalable infrastructure.

Buffy: Welcome to JSA TV where we’re covering the latest stories, trends, and innovations from leaders in the digital infrastructure industry. I’m Buffy Harakidas of JSA, and we have two very special guests today joining me from XKL. We have Casey Inman, she’s the Director of Sales and Marketing, and we also have Chad Lamb. He is the Principal Solutions Architect. So, welcome.

Casey: Thank you. Thank you for having us, Buffy.

Buffy: Absolutely. So, it’s day three of ITW 2025 and we are going to be talking more about XKL and a little bit more about your roles within the company. So, why don’t we start with you, Casey?

Casey: Absolutely, thank you again for having us. So at XKL, our mission is to make DWDM easy. We really want to empower our customers to be able to light dark fiber and take advantage of layer 1 optical network solutions. Part of how we do this is that we have in-house experts. Our company is founded and run by Len Bosack, who’s the original co-founder of Cisco, and then we also have our Director of Engineering, Mike Fahy, who’s been with us for 20-plus years. And then Chad, who’s with us today, who helps run our product roadmap. All of these folks have tons of experience with optical transport, optics in general, which are very complex. And they’ve been working on it from 10G to 400G, and now we’re actually looking at prototyping and we have 800G in our lab right now.

One of the things we do really well is that we’re very consultative. Our customers have said things like “you can tell that XKL’s systems are designed by engineers for engineers”, and we do all of this while still taking into account their business and their customers’ needs.

And then just a little bit about me and then I’ll pass it over to Chad. I’ve been with XKL for a little over two years now. I was brought in to help design and execute the go-to-market strategy, and now I’m really focused on how we drive the vision to make sure that we can help our customers solve their problems at the layer 1 optical network.

Buffy: Well, you’re doing a great job. We’re definitely hearing more and more about XKL since you’ve joined the team.

Casey: And then I was going to have Chad just really quickly introduce a little bit about himself.

Chad Lamb: Thank you. I’m Chad Lamb. I’ve been with XKL for 25 years, a long time, and I really focused on product line development. I work really closely with the sales, marketing, and the engineering team to develop solutions to help our customers solve their problems, rather than create new ones.

Buffy: Well, that’s important. We don’t need any new problems. You recently released two new products, correct? The Fiber Patch Panel and the DAT100, which I understand were inspired by your unique approach. Why don’t you talk a little bit more about that?

Casey: Yeah, absolutely. I’ll start with our fiber management system, our XKL Patch Panel, and then we’ll go ahead and move into the DAT100 after we’ve spoken about that a little bit. One of the things about the patch panel is it seems so simple when you look at it, but if you think about the way that operators are having to deploy hundreds and thousands of these in data centers, it really does become an important piece of the puzzle. When it’s designed well, it can help reduce operational overhead and debugging time.

We are very hands-on with our customers. We observe them in their environment and watch them really struggle with having to feed cables through the back of the rack. Then the labeling is confusing. Just like many of our products are designed by engineers for engineers, we took a second look at this and Chad really helped lay out how to redesign this patch panel. So we’ve now implemented clear labeling, as well as better cabling, which is going to help save operational overhead. Chad had some additional technical things he wanted to touch on about that product.

Chad Lamb: Right. Thanks, Casey. The patch panel came about from customers. They’re trying to deploy equipment and time and time again they’re struggling with breakout cables. This really started back at 4×10 gig circuits but then 4×100 really made the problem worse and 8×100 for the 800 gigs even worse. So these breakout cables, labeling, patch panel confusion—it all added up to deployment problems and delays in getting circuits brought up, which cost our customers money. We heard horror stories of deployment delays for something as simple as this patch panel and cabling exercise. So we came up with a solution. That’s what we do—we solve customers’ problems.

Buffy: Solving problems in today’s challenging landscape is definitely most important.

Casey: One of the other things that we designed similarly—purpose-built—is the DAT100, our DarkStar Aggregation Transponder. The goal of this system is to give operators an option to extend the life of their 10G circuits that they’re still supporting in the network. We designed the DAT100 to provide operators an efficient way to, instead of managing and running 10G down one channel, run 100G down that same channel and still support their 10G. I know Chad has a lot more about the design and the technical elements.

Chad Lamb: Yeah, thanks Casey. The DAT100 is really unique, it’s layer 1 10G aggregation. What that means is we’ve done a purpose-built FPGA approach. It’s not a switch ASIC or router ASIC inside this. That results in about 10x improvement in latency and about a third of the power draw than a typical aggregation deployment. This has enabled our customers to go green and support their 10G circuits, while being much more spectrally efficient in putting the 100G down their fiber.

Buffy: Thank you for giving us more details on the DAT100. Sounds like you created these solutions specifically to meet some of the pressing challenges within the industry for your customers. For sure. What trends are you seeing in the optical layer of the network?

Casey: Yeah, absolutely. Honestly, we could talk about optical networks for hours, but I’ll go ahead and focus on just a couple of the main trends we’re seeing right now. I’ll break it into two pieces. We’re looking at how we can provide operators and network designers with a solution that will give them the capability to more easily offer spectrum, as well as wavelengths, to their customers. They want it to be easy to provide services. So we’re in the process of designing a solution that helps solve that problem at layer 1.

And the other thing we’re actively looking at is 800G. How are we deploying that? Who needs it and when do they need it? I’m going to pass it over to Chad to tease a little more on our new products.

Chad Lamb: Thanks, Casey. Flex Grid solutions are not new, but the efficiencies we’ve provided with this new product—a WSS-based solution—give us the ability to provide customers with 800G support today, even if they’re not deploying 800G for a while. The solution integrates amplifiers, optical channel monitoring, all the statistics needed to operate the system—and we do it in a way that the typical network engineer can deploy, manage, and control.

We hear a lot from customers about the complexities of existing solutions. They don’t understand how to operate them and have to go to their vendor for additional services and support. What they really want is to control their own network. That’s what we’re providing with this new solution. And it will be 800G ready—so when they’re ready to move to the next level, it’ll be very easy for them to do so.

Buffy: Well, thank you so much, Chad, for giving us some insights and a preview of the new solution there. Is there anything else you want to add, Casey?

Casey: Yeah. I’ll leave you with this: XKL is focused on helping empower operators and designers to build the networks of the future. But we’re also very focused on supporting them today—the designers, the operators, the network engineers—with the problems they’re facing now. And we’re having a ton of fun doing that at XKL.

Buffy: Well, having fun is the most important while you’re working so hard to solve these challenges for your clients. Casey, where can viewers go if they want to learn more about XKL?

Casey: Yeah, absolutely. You can find us on LinkedIn and at our website.