Billions In The Bubble: Siara CEO Vivek Ragavan (Part 6)

SM: You moved on from Redback in May of 2001. What came next?

VR: I joined Atrica, which was about Ethernet. When I was at Redback a lot of us were talking about how Ethernet was going to dominate and that SONET would transition into an Ethernet network. Ethernet was already data-centric. The only thing that SONET had that Ethernet did not have was reliability and redundancy. In a LAN network you really didn’t need the level of redundancy that SONET had; however, before Ethernet could become a carrier network it needed to be addressed. Atrica was all about giving carrier class capabilities to Ethernet.

SM: How did you find Atrica?

VR: Their VCs found me. I was not immediately interested in doing something new, but it was one of those things where their idea and my idea were integrated and I felt that the idea just made sense. I had to do it. I am a workaholic anyways. I will probably work until I am 100.

SM: Retirement is a highly overrated concept.

VR: Whatever it means. I don’t even know what it means. I think all it means is that you are not earning a living.

SM: A lot of people would have been burned out after Redback, but you jumped straight into Atrica. How did that go?

VR: Atrica was carrier Ethernet, which was an emerging technology intended to completely supplant SONET. The idea was a good idea but a little bit ahead of its time. The dot com bust had happened and there was excessive capacity. Carriers wanted to make more money on their existing investments and were not looking to put in new investments. They did not care that Ethernet had more bandwidth or that price performance was better under Ethernet than SONET.

At Siara we had built a data-centric SONET network. The idea spread widely. All the major vendors were building it as well. Carriers were putting in incremental changes to their SONET networks to make them data networks as well. They were more concerned with getting more ROI on their existing infrastructure. There was also a lot of fiber that still had not been deployed.

The company was founded in the bubble times and had planned on the bubble continuing. The idea was that the company would continue to develop and bring in money and then in two years’ time turn a profit. It was not to be. The market was slow to emerge and slow to congeal into a particular direction. Carrier Ethernet has multiple avenues in which it can be deployed. It ultimately took residential video transmission, driven by telephone companies desire to get into residential broadband, to drive carrier Ethernet.

SM: What was the timeframe of that direction?

VR: Around 2005 to 2008.

SM: Was that the YouTube phenomena?

VR: YouTube was a different thing. It was Internet video. That was one of the things driving broadband transmission, but it was broadband data. Now, I will admit that broadband data was driving infrastructure for Ethernet, but I could argue that broadband data could have been done with SONET data networks. Interactive video required higher bandwidth. That dictated fiber closer to the home and that is where I think the drive for carrier Ethernet came from, although there are plenty who would debate that with me.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Billions In The Bubble: Siara CEO Vivek Ragavan
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