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Newsletter -- Week Ending April 30, 2004 |
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InternetAcceleration
News Summary Dear reader -- please forgive us for being a little delayed this week but we've been busy. So now that we're here, sit back and take a few minutes while we all get caught up on what's going on in our wonderful world of infrastructure… Are You Ready For This? Being the modest people we are, we're always amazed that so many of you are willing to put up with our rants and tirades and keep coming back (bless you). So it is with some trepidation that we inform you that Peter is up and live (well, an on demand WebCast) on the front page of Cnet News (news.cnet.com) in a 15 minute interview with Editor in Chief Dan Farber talking about the Spam 2004 Report Card. 15 minutes is just enough for Peter to start to get going on Spam, but it was a chance to give an overview to our network-centric perspective of Spam. Next we're thinking of adding a (900) number for Rants-and-Tirades "On Demand." Time for Regime Change? -- As you know, we go out of our way to tell you whenever one of our predictions comes to pass (and we cleverly have amnesia whenever one of our predictions turns out to have been off the mark, but you wouldn't respect us if we were to do otherwise). And unfortunately for Intellisync, it looks like we were dead on when we commented a few months back that it looked like their acquisition strategy over the past two years in an attempt to "own" the synchronization business is turning out to be more dysfunctional than what the company executives had anticipated. Yesterday the company put out a news release saying their quarterly revenues were going to be closer to $11M than the $13.5M to $14.5M the company had anticipated a short while ago, resulting in a net loss of four to five times what was expected. Our guess is that they can't be having too much fun right now and that this is, perhaps, only the tip of an iceberg? Pass the Mash Potatoes -- One of us (John) went to an annual VC annual meeting shindig in a far off warm spot this past week where the overall feeling was optimistic bordering on enthusiastic. These meetings are a great place to gage the pulse of the investment community since they bring together both the venture investors and representatives of the large money funds that provide the fuel for their venture investing. With Google announcing their intentions for an IPO coming just a few days earlier, the crowd was giggly with excitement about what's in store for the next year. That's good news for all of us. Probably the best sign that things are doing well is that the main course for dinner was steak -- in the last few years many of the VC firms putting on their annual meetings had concerns about serving a main course that involved supplying sharp instruments like knives and forks to their limited partners in fear of actually arming an angry mob. Utility Now -- although it sounds like the name of a leftist leaning newspaper from the 30's that's Veritas' new mantra for positioning its differentiation as announced by its chairman and CEO Gary Bloom at Veritas's annual user conference held this week in Las Vegas. It's always a fun event and we were glad to have had the opportunity to attend. And Veritas has had a really good year, so again the hosts are feeling upbeat. "Utility Now" is an attempt to both inspire Veritas' customers to consolidate their IT assets (thereby creating the need for high value storage virtualization) and to inspire Veritas' product development teams to unify its product lines across a central operational theme. That sounds good. But at the end of the day, you have to wonder about whether it's a position that has any differentiation to it. To carry the utility metaphor to the next level, consumers aren't really sure and don't really care if the electricity they're using was generated by a power plant in New York or somewhere up in Canada. If it's virtualization you're talking about, then how can one version be any different than another -- you end up with a distinction without a difference which may be the worst place to end up. But in any case, Utility Now passes the giggle test and, hopefully, Veritas will continue its impressive growth. Novell CTO Emerges With Arroyo TV Networks -- If you've read our newsletter for much time you know that we admire Drew Major one of the creators of NetWare, 20 odd years ago. What is so important about the NetWare internal design (and missing from systems like Windows NT or UNIX) is that it is able to execute software at very high rates (e.g. at the rate at which packets arrive on a 500 MBit second data link) and not get swamped by system overhead. UNIX and NT are very good at multiplexing lots of different program activity but they do that by suspending one program, saving the program context (CPU registers and the like), reloading the context of another program and then restarting the suspended program. That all obviously works well at normal multiplexing rates on a PC or server, but breaks at communications or file server rates. When Drew initially did NetWare use of these low overhead techniques (many geeks would call them a continuation / state table model if they knew about them -- most still don't) were essential, remembering that his team was implementing a LAN fileserver on what was probably a 1MHz PC (roughly 3,000 times less powerful than today's PC's). To be slightly more precise, you need these techniques if you want to create a well-structured software system -- you can create a ball-of-spaghetti mess of code that was fast -- it just wouldn't be easy to debug or maintain. NetWare (and all the NetWare like systems are fast and well-structured). Everyone who has tried to make a very high-speed network appliance software system has ended up re-inventing something pretty much like NetWare. We keep gently pointing out that they have re-invented NetWare, which they typically take badly at first, and then realize that it's true and certainly nothing to be ashamed of. The interesting question is how we graduate so many Computer Scientists of one form or another who are ignorant of this important technology. Drew has shown up as one of the principals of Arroyo TV, a company funded in part by two of the largest cable systems with a mission of delivering standards based video systems into the Cable TV business. The business proposition has two basic legs: (1) video services are poised to take off in the cable business; and (2) modern standard computer technology is good enough to implement these systems with smart software on commodity hardware. We're great fans of software solutions and we agree that video services over cable are about to break as big business. This should be fun to watch. Funding News -- My head is hurting -- twenty one infrastructure startups raised over $200M in the last couple of weeks of April. As we said earlier, the investment community is feeling good and infrastructure companies are clearly some of the beneficiaries.
Quarterly Results Summary -- For the second quarter in a row, we're trying out our new table format for listing corporate earnings. Your comments are welcome.
In other corporate news -- Radware, Intelligent Application Switching (IAS) solutions, has been awarded a US patent for technology incorporated into its flagship product WSD. U.S. Patent No. 6,718,359 details the method for determining network proximity and the use of it as part of load balancing decisions. Lighthouse Communications, data communications and value-added services, completed the acquisition of Focal Solutions, LLC, and will operate under the name of LightEdge Solutions. Sybase agrees to acquire assets of Dejima, mobile access solutions using natural language interface technology. A new industry alliance was announced - the Enterprise Grid Alliance is an open, independent and vendor-neutral community for deploying commercial applications in a grid environment. Members include: EMC, Fujitsu, Siemens Computers, HP, Intel, NEC, Network Appliance, Oracle, Sun, AMD, Ascential Software, Cassatt, Citrix, Data Synapse, Enigmatec, Force10 Networks, Novell, Optena, Paremus and Topspin. NetApp announced it will provide the key storage infrastructure and data management technology in several areas throughout the grid infrastructure. Partnership Announcements -- Fortinet has joined the RSA Secured Partner Program enabling seamless integration of two-factor authentication with FortiGate Antivirus Firewalls. AT&T is using Internap technology to view multiple ISP and carrier networks in order to determine the best path to direct Web traffic on behalf of its hosted customers. EMC Corporation and Brocade Communications Systems announced that EMC will offer the Brocade SilkWorm 24000 Director as a member of the EMC Connectrix family of directors and switches. EMC and INS announced a set of joint professional services solutions to consolidate their e-mail and messaging infrastructure on Microsoft Exchange Server 2003. Commtouch, proprietary anti-spam solutions featuring Recurrent Pattern Detection technology, announced that the company had signed its 67th systems integration partner in North America to its Commtouch Associate Program. AlterPoint, enterprise network configuration management solutions, has joined the Alliance Program of Remedy and will integrate their DeviceAuthority Suite with Remedy's Action Request System. Tarari and Microsoft are working together to enable professional film, video and broadcast production companies to deliver video resolutions directly to the desktop. PGP Corporation has integrated Symantec AntiVirus Scan Engine into its PGP Universal product line for network-based secure messaging. In product news -- Allot Communications, traffic management, announced the availability of NetEnforcer X02 version 5.1, enabling administrators to monitor, classify and optimize network traffic by allocating bandwidth based on business priorities. WARP Solutions, acceleration software, has expanded its SpiderCache product line with the launch of SpiderCache Reverse Proxy, designed to manage a cluster of edge-based caching servers strategically positioned across a network. Ingrian Networks released software that lets organizations securely and effectively offload all cryptographic functions from IBM DB2 databases onto Ingrian's network-based hardware appliances. Netilla Networks announced that its Netilla Security Platform has met the criteria for ICSA Labs SSL VPN Gateway Certification. ICSA Labs, an independent division of TruSecure Corporation, tests and certifies more than 90 percent of the security IT products. Greenfield Networks delivers first Ethernet switch silicon to include full IPv6, MPLS and Layer 2/3 VPNs and addresses a broad range of enterprise and metro markets. The company also announced the GH3032 reference design based on Packetry Architecture and supports all advanced features across 32 GE ports at wire speed. Internap managed VPN service enables secure VoIP, wireless networking and video conferencing leveraging Cisco VPN technology. iAnywhere's new version of M-business Anywhere adds tables support for delivering mobile web content and applications with new features including monitoring and reporting, internationalization support for global deployments. And, HyperSpace Communications, announced general availability of its network acceleration solutions for ISP market. Customer wins -- Network Appliance announced that its enterprise customers are using over 1,000 terabytes (1 petabyte) of NetApp compliance storage, a critical milestone for the regulatory compliance storage market. Force10 Networks announced that worldwide customer deployments and revenue expanded at the fastest pace in the company's history during the first quarter, ending March 31 with increased Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet port deployments in Europe, Asia. NTT-ME, a subsidiary of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone East Corporation, has deployed Force10 Networks' E-Series in a 10 Gigabit Ethernet core upgrade to provide new advanced services to its growing base of broadband subscribers. Rendition Networks, network configuration control solutions, announced the utilization of TrueControl to ensure compliance with regulations, and security best practices at NetIQ. Digital Sandbox, Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) solutions, has been awarded a contract to support the New Jersey Domestic Preparedness Regional Network Pilot Program. Hall & Foreman, civil engineering firm, has deployed Packeteer's Application Traffic Management system to avoid bandwidth upgrades and improve performance of applications including VoIP and video on a newly converged network. University of Texas McCombs School of Business has implemented the TippingPoint's UnityOne Intrusion Prevention System to protect their network from internal and external cyber threats. Philippines Long Distance Telephone Company (PLDT SG) has moved their primary network point-of-presence (PoP) into Equinix's Singapore Internet Business Exchange center to enhance their voice and data connectivity with the leading networks of Asia. Thailand's online game provider, AsiaSoft International Co. Ltd., has chosen Fortinet to supply a network-wide security system for its Ragnarok Online game network. Region 18 Education Service Center, Internet access to 32 school districts with over 80,000 users, purchased TippingPoint's UnityOne Intrusion Prevention Systems to protect their network from cyber threats and piracy. AOK, health insurance company in Bavaria, Germany, has deployed Blue Coat's ProxySG appliances to monitor and secure Web communications and content for 10,000 users throughout Bavaria. eMarketing Association has adopted Qurb as the organization's weapon of choice to fight spam. Venaca and EMC announced a premier technology integration for Turner Entertainment Group's Media asset management Integration Room. Veritas Software selected SQL Anywhere Studio database technology for use within a select number of storage management products. Executives on the move -- Force10 Networks, Ethernet switch/routers, promoted Mark Cooper to vice president of sales. Decru, networked storage security, announced that former U.S. senator Sam Nunn has joined the company as strategic advisor. Former IBM executives, Linda Zider and Carl Caricari join Platform Solutions. Zider becomes vice president and general manager, Siebel Global Financial Services and Caricari as vice president of product development. Tom Spadafore appointed vice president of sales and customer care at Reconnex, hardware-based network security appliances. Sygate Technologies, enterprise endpoint security solutions, appointed Iain Kerr as senior vice president of worldwide sales. CXO Systems, Web services-based software, selected John Busa vice president of product management. Pavilion, neural network modeling to industrial applications, appoints Dave Cooper Chief Technology Officer. Peter Cohen joined Red Bend Software, online and Over-The-Air web deployment of software, as vice president of corporate marketing. Matthew Durkin named CEO at Neartek, software-based tape virtualization. AlterPoint, network configuration management solutions, named David Williams as vice president of marketing. Mike Minelli has been appointed VP of Sales for Active Reasoning, policy-based data center management software. Tidal Software, application automation, integration and management software, appointed Brian McGrath as senior vice president of worldwide sales and Tom Bernhardt as chief technology officer. Ellacoya Networks, bandwidth management solutions, appointed Benoit Legault as vice president of marketing. Colubris Networks, intelligent wireless LAN access solutions, named Marty Falaro as vice president of enterprise and channel sales, Karen Barton as vice president of marketing and Roger Sands as vice president of enterprise development. Good Technology, wireless e-mail and messaging software for handheld devices, named Steve Manser vice president of engineering. Changes at Aruba Wireless Networks include: Pankaj Manglik, co-founder and first CEO is stepping down while Don LeBeau, former Cisco executive, becomes CEO and Michael Lin, vice president of engineering will also be leaving the company. Keith Hoskison, will be vice president of worldwide channels. Vivato, Wi-Fi systems infrastructure, named Raj Matthew as chief financial officer. Zantaz, communications management solutions, appoints Brian Walsh as vice president of services and Joan Burke vice president of human resources. See links below for the complete text of those items mentioned above plus other news. The InternetAcceleration newsletter and www.internetacceleration.com are produced by NetsEdge Research Group. For more information or to keep us updated, contact John Katsaros john@netsedgeonline.com. |
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Product News |
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Allot Delivers Next Generation Network Intelligence
with Release of NetEnforcer v5.1
WARP Solutions Announces New SpiderCache
Multi-Function Software
Ingrian Announces
Solution for Securing Sensitive Data in IBM Databases
Netilla Security Platform Earns ICSA Labs SSL VPN
Gateway Certification
Greenfield Networks Delivers World's Most Advanced
Ethernet Switch Silicon Solution |
Greenfield Networks Delivers Industry's First IPv6 and
MPLS Gigabit Fixed Configuration Switch
Internap Launches
Managed VPN Service
SQL Anywhere Studio from iAnywhere Selected by Veritas
Software
iAnywhere Extends Sync and Go Web Application Support
to Tablet PCs
HyperSpace Announces Acceleration Solution for
Internet Service Providers |
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Corporate News -- Mergers / Acquisitions |
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Lighthouse Completes Acquisition of Focal Solutions and Announces Name Change
Sybase Unlocks Information
Through Simplified access from any Communications Device |
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Corporate News -- Agreements / Partnerships |
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Corporate News -- Funding News |
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Fusepoint Secures $10M
FeedRoom Raises $5.1M
Pulse~LINK Inc. Closed its Series D stock offering for
more than $30 Million
Onaro Secures $7.75M in
a Series B Financing
MontaVista Software Receives $7M
Global Velocity Closes
on $1.5M Investment Round
Calient Networks Boosts
Fourth Funding Round to $35M
WholeSecurity Secures
$10 Million In Series B Funding
Dexterra Raises $16M
Archivas Secures $6M
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Lighthouse Closes $5
Million Round of Private Equity Financing
Meru Networks Secures
$17 Million In New Funding
Terrascale Technologies
completes over-subscribed first round of financing - $2.75M
Scalix Closes $6M in
Financing
Trymedia Systems
announces round 'B' funding
Ubicom Secures $21
Million in Series II Financing
SkyCross Receives $1M
Investment
MetroFi Receives $9M
Firetide Raises $13.6M
RBN Complete Funding
Round
TelePacific Secures $12
Million Equity Investment
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Quarterly Reports |
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Internap Reports
Financial Results for First Quarter 2004
Akamai Delivers
Profitability with Record First Quarter 2004
NetIQ Announces Third
Quarter Fiscal 2004 Results |
TippingPoint
Technologies Reports Fourth Quarter and Fiscal 2004 Results
Equinix Reports Q1 2004
Results
EmailLabs Reports Record Revenue and
Profits for Q1 2004 |
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Corporate News -- Executives on the Move |
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Customer Announcements |
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NTT-ME deploys Force10 E-Series for 10 Gigabit
Ethernet upgrade to deliver advanced voice and data services
Rendition Networks Facilitates Sarbanes-Oxley and
CobiT Compliance for NetIQ
Network Appliance Demonstrates Regulatory Compliance
Storage Market Leadership
Force10 Networks expands revenue and worldwide
customer base at fastest pace in company history during first quarter
New Jersey Launches
Regional Risk Management Initiative
Packeteer Visibility, Control and Compression Selected
by Hall & Foreman
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TippingPoint's UnityOne Intrusion Prevention System
Deployed at the University of Texas McCombs School of Business
Philippines Long Distance Telephone Company (PLDT SG)
Selects Equinix Singapore Center for Interconnection Hub
Fortinet Enables Thailand's Largest Online Game
Provider to Boost Security and Performance of "Ragnarok" Game Network
Region 18 Education Service Center Deploys
TippingPoint's UnityOne Intrusion Prevention System
AOK Selects Blue Coat to Secure Web Use for 10,000
Users
Qurb Keeps Emarketing Association Spam-Free
Venaca and EMC Supply
Integrated Media Solution for Turner Entertainment Group |
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