Billions In The Bubble: Siara CEO Vivek Ragavan (Part 7)

SM: Was Atrica focused on service providers as well?

VR: We were focused on helping businesses get broadband services like high-speed data. We thought Ethernet would be driven by the broadband requirements of businesses and homes and expected that businesses would come first, which indeed happened. There were carriers who built networks to offer business services using carrier Ethernet; however, the market was not that big.

Atrica was in that market and we did sell, and our revenue doubled every year starting in 2002. The problem was that it was that the market was not big enough. What was big enough was residential video transport. Carriers worldwide were competing with cable companies offering residential video services. AT&T’s u-verse service is a good example. France Telecom had something similar. Atrica did not catch the big wave, we caught the smaller wave.

SM: Did you exit Atrica based on the little wave?

VR: We could not go for the big wave because it could only be handled by big vendors. Telephone companies did not want to get involved with startups for that. The only way to get into that game would have been to get ourselves acquired.

Ultimately, we sold Atrica to Nokia Siemens Networks. They wanted to be in the carrier Ethernet space. They had built a residential product but did not have anything for the business side. Ultimately the two products are going to converge, but we did not have the money or channels to compete with those large vendors.

SM: When did you sell that?

VR: In early 2008.

SM: Given the current economic downturn, what do you see for infrastructure companies?

VR: While many of my past successes were in the telcos and service provider markets, I’ve recently been spending more of my time in the enterprise space. It’s definitely true that overall investment in network and application infrastructure is down from previous years, and many companies I interact with are holding off new IT investments. However, I see datacenter re-architecture and IT outsourcing to cloud infrastructure as creating new business opportunities for startups. Right now is one of the best times to be investing in product development; if you can get a company funded, you have a more open playing field with less competition from large companies distracted with managing their existing businesses and other startups.

SM: What you doing right now, and what excites you about your current venture?

VR: I’m currently CEO at XORP, Inc and we’re building an open-network platform that addresses the challenges of the next generation datacenter: flexible networking architecture for cloud infrastructures. XORP started out as an open source routing project at the International Computer Science Institute affiliated with UC Berkeley, and we’ve since received venture funding to pursue our vision of leveraging commodity hardware to change the face of networking layers 2 to 7. What we’re doing is exciting, and the early customer interest is quite phenomenal. We already have Fortune 500 beta customers clamoring for the product because it helps them reduce their opex and capex significantly, which is especially important in today’s world.

SM: Could you briefly detail XORP’s value proposition?

VR: We’ll provide more details as we get closer to product availability, but it probably suffices to say that it’s related to what Cisco recently announced in their Nexus product lines and their “California” project, and will compete with what Juniper talked about in their “Stratus” initiative. Despite having these large competitors, I know that XORP has more focus and can out-execute these large companies and deliver products to the marketplace earlier—that’s the essence of why startups succeed. Plus, we are willing to drive to commoditization the pieces that large incumbents try to protect and charge high margins for—it’s very hard to cannibalize your cash cows. It’s this challenge that we look forward to every day.

SM: This has been a great interview. We will do another interview about your current endeavors shortly.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Billions In The Bubble: Siara CEO Vivek Ragavan
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