The Wu-fu man is at it again, I love his idea's: Cascade Founder and Former Cisco Executives Announce Shasta Networks FYI
December 9, 1998 -- The leading data
communications entrepreneur Wu-fu
Chen and former Cisco executives today
announced Shasta Networks Inc. The
company is developing a new class of
service-enabling gateway at the
"subscriber edge'' of the Internet and
public data networks. This will enable
network service providers and telcos to
provide profitable, network-based,
value-added services. The company has
raised $5.65 million in first-round funding
from premier networking venture capital
firms Benchmark Capital and Institutional
Venture Partners (IVP) both of which are
represented on the board. Shasta
Network's innovative products have
generated significant interest from many
leading service providers and will be
entering into extensive customer trials in
early 1999.
Mr. Chen, CEO and chairman of the board
of Shasta, is best known for his role as
founder of Cascade Communications and
a number of other successful networking
ventures that spearheaded all areas of
access and backbone connectivity. The
other members of the management team,
including founders Anthony Alles,
Arthur Lin and Tom Daly, are former
Cisco executives who bring many years of
experience building and marketing the full
range of network transport platforms and
technologies.
"My previous companies, from Cascade
onwards, were driven by my belief that
network access costs had to be drastically
reduced if network usage was to become
universal. With the networking industry
now on the verge of accomplishing this
goal, however, network providers can no
longer rely upon a business model driven
purely by connectivity. It is time to turn
our efforts to developing the systems that
will enable new network-based services
that fully exploit and enhance the value of
the IP public network infrastructure and
build a profitable business model for
service providers,'' said Mr. Chen. "This
will be critical to next generation public
carriers building out expensive IP
infrastructures, ISPs needing to compete
with large facilities providers and to
traditional telcos migrating from high
margin, voice networks to multiservice IP
backbones.''
"IP networks today are increasingly
transparent to customers, so all customer
loyalty and value goes to the content
providers and web portals,'' said Juha
Heinanen, director of technology for
DataCom & Internet Service for Telia
Finland, and a member of the Technical
Advisory Board of Shasta. "What Shasta
is doing will enable service providers to
build customer relationships through
outsourced network-based services that
will differentiate us from our competitors
and make the Internet easier and cheaper
to deploy by our customers.''
Current edge routers are focused purely
on aggregating large enterprise and
service provider networks into the
Internet core through leased lines.
However, new cost-effective, high-speed
access technologies such as DSL,
wireless networks and cable modems are
expanding the market to less technically
sophisticated small and medium-sized
businesses, as well as remote offices and
telecommuters. The key to the future
profitability of IP public data network
providers will be in their ability to meet
the currently unfulfilled market demand
from these new customers for
network-based, value- added services that
reduce the cost of service deployment
and maintenance.
This requires a new class of telco-scale,
service-creation gateways at the
subscriber edge of public data networks,
together with subscriber policy
management systems that will enable the
cost-effective deployment of such
network-based services as outsourced
firewalls, Internet telephony and virtual
private networks (VPNs). These centrally
provisioned, access-independent,
network-based service gateways, will
dramatically lower the cost and complexity
of deploying services over today's CPE
and network appliance-based solutions,
and therefore help bring new services to
the mass market.
"The customer relationship with any
service provider is really set at the edge of
the network, and that's where the greatest
changes in features and equipment can be
expected over the next decade,'' said Tom
Nolle, president of CIMI Corporation. "A
new class of device that could be called a
'virtual service point' will emerge as a key
in service provider infrastructure-
building, particularly for the lucrative VPN
service market. Shasta's concept of a
service-enabling edge device is very
consistent with the principles of this new
device class.''
A Who's Who of Networking Leaders and
Experts
Shasta has built a strong and experienced
team with core competencies in both IP
networking and the necessary elements of
IP services, including firewalls, IP
security, IP routing, scalable PPP support
and subscriber management, voice
integration, ATM transport, traffic
management, operations and
provisioning. Shasta is also actively
involved with the definition of the next
generation of IP services and service
deployment infrastructure, most recently
by leading the efforts at the Internet
Engineering Task Force (IETF) to define a
comprehensive framework for IP VPNs,
which will form the foundation of all
edge-to-edge IP services.
Wu-fu Chen, age 48, has started and
grown eight communications companies
including Cascade Communications where
he was a founder and vice president of
engineering. While there, he guided
Cascade through its IPO in 1994 and on to
the company's peak of more than $10
billion in capitalization. Most recently, he
was a vice president at Cisco Systems
where he led Cisco's integrated voice,
data and video access product
development. Before that, Mr. Chen was
chairman and CEO of the leading edge
start-ups Ardent Communications and
Arris Networks which were acquired by
Cisco and Ascend Communications
respectively.
Anthony Alles, age 33, who is co-founder
and president of Shasta, was formerly
director of ATM and gigabit Layer 3
switch product marketing at Cisco. Mr.
Alles conceived and led the marketing
strategy which allowed Cisco to achieve
leadership in ATM technology. Most
recently, he also initiated and led the
marketing and standards strategy for the
launch of Cisco's Tag Switching
technology, which forms the core of the
IETF's MPLS specification.
Arthur Lin, age 35, is co-founder and vice
president of engineering and
manufacturing at Shasta. Dr. Lin is a
well-known authority on ATM and IP
traffic management. He was most recently
senior engineering manager and technical
leader at Cisco Systems where he was the
principal architect of the Cisco
LightStream 1010 ATM switch that
established Cisco's leadership in the
ATM market. Dr. Lin was also key in the
development of Cisco's multi-layer gigabit
Layer 3 switching products and DSL
access platforms. He has several patents
and pending patents in these areas.
Tom Daly, age 38, who is the CTO of
Shasta, was formerly vice-president of
engineering at Cisco Systems and led the
design of most of Cisco's router platforms.
Mr. Daly brings to Shasta unmatched
experience and expertise in the
architecture of IP routing and switching
platforms.
Shasta Networks
Headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA., Shasta
Networks designs, develops and markets
a new class of service-enabling gateways
and subscriber policy management
systems at the "subscriber edge'' of IP
public data networks. This will enable
ISPs and telcos to transition from a pure
connectivity-based business model to
profitable, network-based, value-added
services.
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