re: Is Procket Heading Toward the Edge? No one on this board seems to have drawn the analogy yet, but does this remind anyone of Caspian Networks ? You can't deny them their hubris, but if I were to ask a bunch of VCs for $200m, I wouldn't say we're building a better edge router. I'd say we're building the box to replace all boxes (ala Caspian).
I was thinking Zhone was a better analogy, with the VCs throwing $500mln down the toilet. What cracks me up about noitall's posts is that he actually thinks there will be demand for another edge box vendor. Is he serious? With all due respect, has a carrier actually approached Procket and said "we need this product"?
I think the extent of the response on this board is proof that most of the LR readers are sentient minds, not a bunch of rumor mongers.
re: Is Procket Heading Toward the Edge?Procket has all the ingredients(Top management, Smart engineers,lots of money and buisness connections to get in bed with ISPs and RBOCs) to succeed. But let's face it that just doesn't cut it. You still have to deliver. One thing may help them a lot is dropping their arrogance level. Lots of good people didn't join them because of high octane stupid arrogance.
Somebody talked about working under high-pressure at Procekt. So Procket folks, here is the challenge. Avoid what Chromatic did and dare not to be one more interesting case study for silicon valley or those lousy MBAs who claim that you can be successful just based on good sales/marketing team without a comelling product..
re: Is Procket Heading Toward the Edge?> I was thinking Zhone was a better analogy, with the VCs throwing $500mln down the toilet.
Well, I thought of them too, but their $500m deal wasn't all VC money. Quite a bit of it consisted of loans and LBO financing that wasn't necessarily to be used in product development, but also in acquiring existing companies. And they used that money to buy companies (or pieces thereof) that were already selling (sometimes high volume / low margin) products. Anyways, bottom line is that they didn't plan to spend all that money building a fresh, all encompassing product, unlike Caspian and Procket. All three have stories that are incredibly dependant on the reputations of key members, however.
Coming back to the edge ASIC issue, it's been suggested that off the shelf solutions are available for an edge box. For someone that used to make an access product and is looking to add edge features to the product (a router blade, for example), I can see an off the shelf chipset being considered. But if you want to build a competitive product that sits squarely at the edge, there's almost no way of getting around building your own ASIC, and a damn well complicated chip it's going to be. The ready-made solutions can handle all your essential edge features, but given how we keep adding new variants of protocols, it'd be suicide to tie your roadmap to that of Vittesse or Intel or any of the other vendors, for that matter.
Additionally, the edge market keeps expanding in terms of applications, so boxes have to move downstream (for a DSLAM story) and well as sideways (to make a play in the wireless market). Off the shelf chips are too generic to handle all these permutations and unless you have large volumes, you could have a hard time getting Intel etc to modify their roadmaps so that you can nimbly enter new markets.
I still hold that a company looking at competing in the edge needs to control it's ASICs. As for whether edge ASICs are more/less complex, one indicator is the fact that no serious edge vendor is using an off the shelf chipset in the critical path (I'm not completely sure about the control plane - anyone using Sibyte etc ?).
Procket deciding to move into the edge market ? Conceivable, if foolhardy. Them doing so because the ASICs would be easier, or unnecessary ? I don't think so. ps. Should be obvious given my tone, but I don't work for any of the companies mentioned in this post.
-you are totally a clueless who has no idea how businesses are run.
People buy a product based on whether it works and meets defined requirements or not. No body is going to buy any product just because some one names tony li works there (tony li is not Bruce Lee who can sell something by image alone!).
Supposedly successful teams fail to deliver and individuals can't always repeat their own success. The real devil is in execution not in the concepts - if conecpts could fly - all startu-ups will have a working product at the end of day.
Also, only tony's a 5 year old will call him "great" (dad - i mean ;-)) - he is just a mature software engineer who did work on early implementation of BGP (i am not trying to degrade his skills - but he isn't JFK, or Martin Luther King Jr., oe Einstein). Then so what? Many people have also since then written BGP code and understand BGP as well as Tony does.
The question still remains - do they have a viable marketing propostion and if they do - do they have ability to execute and if they have - Can they really deliver the final product as defined.
Knowing what I do for Procket - I don't really know the answer. Unlike other people - I would neither degrade them - nor will add to the hype.
re: Is Procket Heading Toward the Edge?It should be matter of great if ASICS for the router products is not working. PRocket has spent over $150 million over the development efforts and it finds that the ASICs are not working. It should be a matter of great concern.
Change of product stragy in the middle of the game would be a great disaster. If the Procket Engineers can not come out with ASICs, it would be hard to stay in business. The Router market both at the edge and the core is very competitive.
It does not help procket to hire people from Cosine which itself has not been very successful company.
It is not vclear as to why Procket managed pto procure a huge sum of VC money. This itself should be cause of concern. I personally cannot think of anything so greast and profound that prompted lavish funding without any limits.
re: Is Procket Heading Toward the Edge?If you just bet on the team, you would have bet on Einstein in 1920's to discover quantum mechanics. You would not take Heisenberg or Dirac seriously, who were just two graduate students back then. Not to mention Schrodinger, who originally was not even a physicist.
Just because Heisenberg and Dirac founded the theory of quantum mechanics, you would have bet on them in 1940's to solve the quantum electrodynamics puzzles, on which Feynman and Schwinger's work won them the Nobel prize.
In 1994, you would have bet on Long Capital Management, a hedge fund managed by Merton and Scholes, two of the three guys who formed the Black-Scholes formula, the theoretical foundation of mordern finance. Merton and Scholes won the Nobel prize in 1997. In 1998, the failure of their fund were so bad that it almost brought down the whole Wall Street and the Fed had to manage a bail out of the fund.
re: Is Procket Heading Toward the Edge?Now we all say things we wish we could take back or weren't meant for print, but this is a serious transgression. Politics is her calling. I cannot take this representative seriously. In fact I heard this answer when asked about product development:
"ItGÇÖs not true; our products are really shipping,GÇ¥ says Suzanne Panopolos, director of marketing for Procket. GÇ£We just happen to ship them from one department to the next. All our customers are extremely pleased with our solutiuon set and how we've brought them to market. So, I wouldnGÇÖt say our products aren't shipping. In fact, we have 100% market share in our specific market and our departments said they won't take shipment from any other router vendor."
re: Is Procket Heading Toward the Edge? In 1994, you would have bet on Long Capital Management, a hedge fund managed by Merton and Scholes, two of the three guys who formed the Black-Scholes formula, the theoretical foundation of mordern finance. Merton and Scholes won the Nobel prize in 1997. In 1998, the failure of their fund were so bad that it almost brought down the whole Wall Street and the Fed had to manage a bail out of the fund.
Agree. It isn't just the jockey. It isn' just the horse. You need to be in the right race with very few competitors. Sending Procket into the edge market is like asking the management team to jump into Monterrey Bay and swim to Oahu. Fat chance.
I was thinking Zhone was a better analogy, with the VCs throwing $500mln down the toilet. What cracks me up about noitall's posts is that he actually thinks there will be demand for another edge box vendor. Is he serious? With all due respect, has a carrier actually approached Procket and said "we need this product"?
I think the extent of the response on this board is proof that most of the LR readers are sentient minds, not a bunch of rumor mongers.