10 companies to watch; From CLECs to application-aware switch vendors, these start-ups warrant your attention.
Network World, April 24, 2000 p95
By Beth Schultz
2nd Century
2nd Century Communications is a next-generation competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC) that preaches the convergence gospel and believes mightily in the power of ATM.
This CLEC is delivering a host of services, including local and long-distance voice, Internet access, e-mail and Web hosting, over the same T-1 access link. At the customer premises, voice and data feed into a Vina Technologies integrated access device, which converts the traffic into ATM. Out in the WAN, multiservice switches from Convergent Networks hand off voice calls to the traditional public network and IP data to the Internet.
2nd Century already operates in 12 cities. It plans to increase the number to 35 by year-end and 48 by mid-2001. It's got the gumption, and the cash. In January, the carrier pulled in a whopping $50 million in financing from a single source. A phenomenal figure for any start-up, these big bucks simply top off the $30 million 2nd Century had already accumulated in round one and two funding.
2nd Century targets small and midsize companies with its convergence mission. It wants to "e-enable them," helping such companies better compete in the new 'Net economy.
Adero
The need for Web content distribution continues to spawn interesting new companies, Adero among them. Like competitors Akamai Technologies (one of the 10 companies we watched in 1999), Digital Island and SightPath, Adero provides caching and replication services from servers it places around the Internet. Content distribution is just the first step for this start-up.
What Adero is really shooting for is the creation of a global server network on which rides its basic content distribution service, plus more advanced functions, such as transaction processing. With GlobalWise Commerce, for example, a company could rely on Adero to process e-commerce transactions on servers in close proximity to their customers. Pushing the worldwide angle, GlobalWise Context will let a company localize and personalize e-commerce content and transactions. With GlobalWise Applications, companies will be able to run business-to-business and business-to-consumer applications on Adero servers across the Internet.
The services ride over Adero's GlobalWise Network, which includes more than 70 nodes in 28 countries, in partnership with 17 Tier 1 Internet backbone providers. To speed content delivery over that network, Adero recently acquired software companies StarBurst Software and Fast Engines.
Nearly 50 businesses have signed on with Adero, including Barclay Card, BigDeal.com and the International Herald Tribune.
Bowstreet
Network World's "Wired Windows" columnist Dave Kearns bestowed his networking Most Valuable Player for 1999 Award on Bowstreet founders (NW, Jan. 17, p. 26). It only seems logical that we closely track what these guys are up to. And what's that? Business-to-business e-commerce with big doses of automation technology, XML and directory services, manifesting themselves as a new e-commerce standard and a software environment.
The standard, known as the Digital Services Markup Language (DSML), presents directory services information in XML. AOL/Netscape, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, Sun - anybody who's anybody in directory services - support DSML and are helping with further development of it.
The product, Web Automation Factory, lets companies customize business-to-business e-commerce sites and integrate content - internal or external - virtually at will. In its five months of shipping, the package has already been put to use at Fortune 500 companies such as Federal Express, IBM, Merrill Lynch and at dot-com ventures such as Adauction. com, Get Connected and NetRatings. In fact, Bowstreet reports that during the fourth quarter 1999, it entered into contracts valued at more than $1 million.
E-commerce, XML and directory services all promise to be big technologies in the 2000s, and Bowstreet is definitely at the crossroads.
Loudcloud
We all remember Marc Andreessen as the boy genius who created the first graphical browser, founded Netscape and launched the Internet revolution. Granted, that's probably more credit than any one person is due, but Andreessen does have an aura about him that piques one's curiosity. So it was with much fanfare that Andreessen unveiled his new start-up in February.
As is the fashion these days, Loudcloud has entered the outsourcing realm. It does so with Web site automation technology called Opsware and a services package called Smart Cloud. Through Smart Cloud, a dot-com operation gets the software, hardware and Web operations infrastructure - Web servers, databases, storage and the like - it needs to launch an e-commerce venture. Pretty standard fare when it comes to Web hosting, until you factor in Opsware.
With this technology, Loudcloud automates tasks that need to be done by hand elsewhere. The software can adjust capacity, reconfigure a server, balance the load among servers, tune the operating system kernal and more. If an e-commerce site is being bombarded by heavy volume, for instance, a manager can tell Opsware to add more capacity. Opsware will start extra rack-mounted computers and disk arrays.
Loudcloud has grabbed a wholesome $68 million in funding and has teamed with prominent networking and Internet players for use of their respective products and services. Partners are EMC, Exodus Communications, GlobalCenter, Hewlett-Packard, iPlanet, Oracle and Sun.
As of its launch, Loudcloud had already signed seven Internet companies as customers. Among them are DreamLot, for a next-generation car shopping site; HomeGain, for its home seller Web site; and gift portal Wish.com.
Loudcloud is indeed making a lot of noise in the online world.
Network ICE
Hacking abounds, and any network is vulnerable. That's really all that needs to be said about why we've included an intrusion-detection company on our watch list.
But we can say plenty more about why Network ICE is the particular company we chose. The highlight is its technology. In a comparative review conducted last year for Network World, Network ICE took home our World Class Award for the excellent tracking and alerting capabilities of its BlackICE and ICEcap tools. Subsequently, those products earned our Best of the Tests Award for scoring in the top 10% of all tested in 1999, with a 9.3 out of 10.
When the agent-based BlackICE detects uninvited visitors, it reports the intrusion to the ICEcap management module. In turn, ICEcap analyzes the intrusion information from the agents and uses it to spot widescale attacks on a network.
Intel announced last month it is licensing the Network ICE software for use with its digital subscriber line modems and other products. It also has taken an equity stake in the company.
NoWonder
NoWonder has all the makings of a successful e-business - prominent backers (including eBay Founder and Chairman Pierre Omidyar), overflowing coffers and, perhaps best of all, a pretty cool solution to a problem that has plagued user organizations since the advent of networked PCs: effective technical support.
NoWonder provides a friendly online resource for computer users with questions about software, hardware, programming and the like. A user has the option of getting help while "talking" to a technician in a live chat session or via e-mail from a qualified expert. For a particularly troublesome scenario, a user can grant shared desktop access so a technician can actually fix the problem. For a minor quirk, a user can simply browse through a list of Web sites and link to those that might help him remedy the problem on his own.
To date, a half-million registered users have tried NoWonder's online help, supplied by thousands of technicians. Customers include AOL/Netscape, Apple Computer and Microsoft, and partners include McAfee.com and SkillsVillage.com.
Now NoWonder's challenges are bringing on additional corporate service providers and IT consultants and building a robust infrastructure for the sale and delivery of support services. NoWonder will charge fees to service providers that use its infrastructure, and technicians will be chosen for the live help sessions through a reverse auction bidding process.
Are technical support e-marketplaces the wave of the future? Keep an eye on NoWonder to find out.
Quantum Bridge
Of all the hot, young optical networking companies out there, Quantum Bridge Communications is the one that gets closest to the enterprise. Provided network conditions are right, service providers need only deploy the company's Optical Access System and they can offer any size business customers affordable bandwidth services, ranging from 1M to 100M bit/sec and into dedicated wavelengths.
Quantum Bridge differentiates itself through the use of a special protocol that makes it possible to split wavelengths of light into time slots. That means one wavelength can be shared by up to 32 customers. Carriers would have the option of letting enterprise users add and drop bandwidth, in 1.7M bit/sec increments, using secure Web connections.
Also on the plus side, Quantum Bridge's system uses passive optical networking (PON) technology. With PONs, carriers can deploy these high-bandwidth services simply by placing the Quantum Bridge gear at the service node and on the customer premises. They do not need to invest in more costly equipment for provisioning ATM to enterprise users.
Cable provider Comcast has been testing the products since January, and four or five other service providers will get the gear soon for testing. Quantum Bridge expects to begin drawing revenue on the Optical Access System in June or July.
RiverSoft
Something is afoot in the systems management industry: Fledgling and established vendors alike are heavily pushing automated, integrated management systems for networks, systems and applications. Start-up RiverSoft is in the thick of it.
In fact, RiverSoft has one of the most far-reaching strategies, reports Dennis Drogseth, a director at market researcher Enterprise Management Associates, in the Feb. 7 newsletter on network systems management he penned for Network World. Granted, everybody has a lot to prove in this market and plenty of naysayers to convert, but for a young company, RiverSoft is doing convincingly well.
In January, the company debuted the network management operating system, called i3 philOSophy, and announced plans to push it as a de facto operating system. I3 philOSophy essentially acts as middleware, allowing smoother operation between network applications and the servers they ride on. One of its licensees is SilverBack Technologies, another company on our watch list.
The first application, OpenRiver, detects and maps the connectivity of networks and their subsequent changes. Because of the automation of typically manual processes, customers don't accumulate the high costs often associated with change management.
RiverSoft is targeting any organization with a large and complex network, service provider or user enterprise. Enterprise customers include Booz Allen, Nomura Research Institute and Goldman Sachs. In one of its latest moves, RiverSoft promises to divert some of the $35 million in round-four financing it received in late February to building a world-class support operation for these and future customers.
SilverBack
SilverBack has latched onto the application service provider (ASP) concept, but it isn't hosting anything, at least not remotely. In an unusual twist, SilverBack offers on-site hosting of network management applications.
SilverBack gives customers a homegrown, Linux-based device that runs off-the-shelf monitoring, reporting and security tools and customized application software. The box sits on a critical path, say off the main router, gathering, integrating and then correlating information from those tools. Subscribers to SilverBack's InfoCare service can view the data locally through a Web interface, in real time, to find out what device or application has failed; why; how the network might be impacted; and how the problem might be fixed. Because the InfoCare service is local, it isn't subject to the vagaries of Internet connections from which other ASPs may suffer.
SilverBack unveiled InfoCare in late February. It offers network alerts, asset inventory, network infrastructure performance monitoring and security scanning applications. Later iterations will add intrusion detection, root cause analysis, application monitoring and network virus scanning.
Top Layer Networks
Once known as BlazeNet and focused on bringing application-aware switches to small companies, this start-up vendor is now known as Top Layer Networks and is intent on seeing its product deployed in big enterprise networks.
The shifts came following the arrival of Bruce Cohen as president and CEO, and his recognition that BlazeNet could get a lot more mileage of the technology if cast differently. He wanted to promote the importance of the company's policy engine and the fact that it could prioritize traffic based on Layer 7 application information.
Looks like his thinking was sound. AppSwitch 2500 has won industry kudos all around, including our own Best of the Tests Award for 1999. Our testing, conducted by Network World Test Alliance member John Bass, verified that the switch can achieve wire-speed performance while handling Layer 2 and 3 bridging and routing functions; acts as an application-level firewall; and can prioritize the flow of network traffic by application. Bass, who is technical director for Centennial Networking Labs at North Carolina State University, said he was skeptical at first but that the switch definitely passed his muster.
And, perhaps more important, the AppSwitch 2500 has passed the rigors of various enterprise users. Top Layer is growing an impressive customer list, populated by names such The Boston Globe, Bear, Stearns, and, recently, Amazon.com.
Whether Top Layer ever reaches the heights of Cisco remains to be seen. But it has made an impressive start. |
