Hey Lance98, here is another comment for you…
This relates to my early May note on Dune Networks/Gobi and CWNT.
Remember this guy??? ---- Gideon Kaempfer
Co-Founder and CTO - Gideon Kaempfer
Gideon has more than 14 years of R&D experience in networking, software and hardware.
Before founding Silverkite, Gideon was the CTO and co-founder of Charlotte’s Web Networks, a core IP router vendor. Under his technical leadership, Charlotte’s Web Networks transformed from a start-up to a well-known and respected router vendor with over 120 employees. During this period he helped raise $80M in funding. He led the development of custom designed chipsets based on ASIC's and FPGA's for network processing, traffic management and switching at speeds of 10Gbps and 40Gbps per port.
Prior to that, Gideon worked for the VLSI department at the IBM Research Center in Haifa where he developed automatic test generators for PowerPC processors.
Gideon is an officer (reserve) of the Israeli Defense Forces where he was part of the prestigious “Haman Talpiyot " technological program. He brings years of experience in Telco grade system development, ASIC and FPGA design as well as routing protocols and TCP/IP network technologies.
He holds a B.Sc. (Summa Cum Laude) in Computer Engineering and a MSc. in Computer Science from the Technion - Israeli Institute of Technology. silver-kite.com
“Silverkite is a stealth-mode networking startup focused on addressing the growing Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Infrastructure challenge for large enterprises.”
The silver-kite website looks and feels brand new and this note seems to support the conclusion that this development is relatively recent.
March 18 2005
Hi Roger, I wanted to let you know that we have decided to take the office at 1 Liberty Plaza. I like to take this opportunity and thank you for all the efforts and going the extra mile in helping us throughout this process. A very unique and high scale service I have not encountered in a long time. Cheers, Eyal Eyal Maor
searchofficespace.com
Kaempfer was the key technologist at CWNT towards the end.. He was a bright cookie and you might expect that he wouldn't sit around forever waiting for Noam et.al. to get their act together... Makes one wonder what exactly Noam meant when he said,
"We have a tremendous team there. They're working on next-generation products, and we are extremely excited about what we hope to accomplish there. Obviously I cannot discuss it at this moment, but we anticipate that there will be product introduction probably a year from now, maybe 3/4 from now. "
Also makes you wonder who is/was on the team???? And how they manage to spend $600,000 per quarter on this "development stage enterprise." without someone like Kaempfer actively leading a project team engaged in useful work.
I think this angle provides further support for the notion that CWNT is not coming back, at least as it was.. My speculation that CWNT will return, if at all, as a sales and marketing outfit for a Dune/GOBI-type machine looks a little stronger now...
I think this conference in August 2002 was Kaempfer’s last public appearance for CWNT. <http://www.logtel.com/conferences/ipconv02/thanks_pix.html
"Gideon Kaempfer, Charlotte’s Web Network, spoke of non-stop routers. An exiting speaker, with some solid fundamentals to back him up." (interesting typo)
This conference was about the same time Dune Networks got off the ground with its initial round of funding.. Shortly thereafter (September 2002), CWNT laid off 30% of its workforce followed in March 2003 with another layoff of 20 employees.
A year after that (April 2004), Noam is quoted as noted above: "They're working on next-generation products, and we are extremely excited about what we hope to accomplish there."
It’s a real headscratcher as to what he meant and what they are up to (if anything)... Consider also that from the beginning of CIBC's coverage of MRV, the existence and continued funding of CWNT was a big negative for them in their analysis and reporting on MRV. In the face of that negative drag due to at least one Wall Street firm's view of MRV, they persisted in pushing money at CWNT without any visible progress toward a meaningful result...
One can only hope marketing the Dune Gobi machine will be the end result because otherwise it does not look any too promising..
hc |
