re: Procket Gets UnstealthyIf I remember correctly Procket did something similar last May or June. Lots of chip designers put onto the street because their job was complete.
Force10 has done similar things. Must be a sign of the times.
re: Procket Gets UnstealthyWell, Bill Kraus has to earn that 2 million dollar bonus he recieved over his first year somehow, and "making a viable product" is just not an option at this point, so he has to do the next best thing... "streamline the organization"....
The funny thing is that he actually sat up with the ASIC group for like a few months to pretend to be their friends, then as soon as he left the area, come around with his new lap dog of a VP and witch-hunt the fysty ones, and get everyone looking for a new job. By November maybe 5% of those chip's original owners of blocks which get used were left, and that wasn't good enough, so they chopped it down to 0% this last layoff.
The dude has got 2 brass ones, I gotta give that to him.
re: Procket Gets UnstealthyRandom, are you kidding?
ASIC guys have been the bane of Caspian's existence other than their stupid Nortellers (Graham--screw you, you free spending, fish tank loving, taj mahal building idiot) and their blind, almost cultish devotion to Larry is a little odd. Larry--I love ya, but you should've kept a lower profile.
ASIC guys there were a bunch of primadonna pains in the ass and everyone knows it. Oh, and everyone also knows they never got anything done to justify their high maintenance "costs."
If you see a Caspian ASIC resume come across your desk, run, don't walk. Anyone who's still there actually got something done and if the doers were shown the door, well, I bet Dan Lenoski at Cisco would love to hear from you.
Bill did what he had to do. Good riddance to those guys. And I bet he lost more sleep over it than most would have.
I'm puzzled by the volume of acid directed towards Caspian in the boards. Yeah, the hype is lame and a little cheesy (Dallas, you listening?) But what they are doing is interesting and people don't give them any credit for coming up with something new, vs. Hypedupchip and Charlotte's gay ass Web, and all the others who were me-toos (Avici, Pluris, the list goes on).
JNPR and CSCO architectures are getting real old. The traffic engineering costs are outrageous and you're still nowhere near having a stable core. I personally think Caspian should have a shot if they can figure out a way to raise another $100 million (crazy but I think they can).
Caspian has 30 customer trials going on which is costing their customers a lot of money. Carriers don't let you into the lab these days unless they really like what you're doing. Let's wait and see if they can pull it off before writing them off.
re: Procket Gets Unstealthyfine, fine. i know this is a troll, but i'm not the bigger man here.
The Caspian ASIC team designed a number of very complex ASICs that worked. That is an accomplishment. They did not have a blind devotion to Larry and were in fact some of his most outspoken critics in the company. This is the primary reason the team was blacklisted. They were the ones implementing the design and knew the problems. Upper management isolated the team from the rest of the company so as not to "poison" them with the issues being brought up. Primadonnas? These guys worked hard for two years, long hours and a devotion to making the chips work even though they had serious concerns. The politics in that company, many of it started by the Nortel managers you mentioned, were incredible. The ASIC team was isolated, understaffed, and made scapegoats. This led to some frustration within the team. That I can not deny.
Any of the engineers from other teams who interacted with them know the truth. Remember wiley, there is always another perspective.
One thing you got right though is about Graham. That man is the biggest reason Caspian may fail. The management hierarchy and empire building was amazingly not well thought out.
re: Procket Gets UnstealthyIf I remember correctly Procket did something similar last May or June. Lots of chip designers put onto the street because their job was complete. ================ No. What happened at procket was supposedly disagreements over the direction of the company and bad execution on ASICs.
They hired CPU designers from SUN. And the problem with people like that is that when they go to a startup, they forget that they no longer have the massive support system for designs that a big company provides. They tried to do too much and were pushing the envelope (lots of all-custom stuff). They also supposedly tried to do lots of things with contractors.
It wasn't that they were getting rid of people for economics, it was more that the company had to set a single direction that everyone agreed to....and anyone who didn't agree had to get out.
As a disclaimer, these are the things I heard at the time from other people. They may or may not be the whole truth.
re: Procket Gets UnstealthyCaspian has 30 customer trials going on which is costing their customers a lot of money. Carriers don't let you into the lab these days unless they really like what you're doing. Let's wait and see if they can pull it off before writing them off. ================= I dont believe that they have 30 real trials going. Caspian has been dishonest about their progress for years. I dont know where they are, but I know where they are not. And where they are not says lots more about whats going on.
Their big bet since the beginning was on C&W. They had the inside track there at first, but they didn't follow through. And when C&W imploded, it really hurt them.
And as far as the acid, part of it is that doing this whole re-launch was just really cheap. And doing it the same day as procket was just low-class.
re: Procket Gets Unstealthymy my, name calling, name dropping and blacklisting. What have we come to? I thought California was a right to work state. "Oh, and everyone also knows that..." Blacklisting is a little bit illegal. For shame.
Let me tell a story about an engineer who was silenced. He said that the "O" rings in the booster rockets might become brittle with extreme cold. Did silencing him prevent the Challenger disaster from happening? Will silencing the engineers who really do know the product keep $262 million dollars from being wasted. Maybe?
"Nobody is giving Caspian credit for coming up with something new" because "microFlows" are not new.
So what about Juniper's new T640 is "real old".
Procket has got something new... and sweet!
The "Valley" is small and actions speak louder than words. How often have I heard it is just a matter of execution. There is real proof that an ASIC designer has done his job. Do the ASIC's funtion as intended... yes. ASICs are a small part of the puzzle. How many times have I heard that the best technology doesn't always win...
So lets stop this name calling and have a real contest where all these new shiny routers get together in a Light reading super shoot out! Bake off.. Cage match... Router Rally.
re: Procket Gets Unstealthy - The ASIC implementation of micro-flow based scheduling with Qos as the heart and soul of a scalable terabit router turns out to be almost a mission impossible or does not make any sense (a router within a router as Skeptic said). With probably less than 7 ASIC designers on board at this moment, you tell me what they can do ?!
- "...The Asian market is likely to be where both Caspian and Procket find success first. China, Korea, and Japan have all seen an explosion in IP traffic growth ..."
Force10 has done similar things. Must be a sign of the times.