Making A Mark Newsweek Lists Daines Among 100 Key People During Next Century

The founder of Spokane’s newest and most exotic high-tech company is on Newsweek magazine’s list of 100 Americans who will be prominent figures during the next century.

Bernard Daines, president and chief executive officer of Packet Engines Inc., makes the Newsweek list with folks like Blockbuster Video and sports magnate H. Wayne Huizenga; Apple co-founder Steve Jobs; political figures Thurgood Marshall Jr. and Jesse Jackson Jr.; actors Tom Cruise and Edward Norton; singer Deana Carter whose debut album was entitled “Did I Shave My Legs For This?”; as well as Warren Buffett, Michael Eisner, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfey.

“I’m really not very comfortable with this,” Daines said Wednesday from his Spokane Valley office. “I didn’t know a thing about it until my brother-in-law called me from California last night and said ‘Congratulations.’

“I asked him for what, and he said I ought to look at a copy of Newsweek.”

The magazine’s introduction to its list explains, “As we peer ahead to the dawn of another century, it is not too soon to identify some of the faces we’ll be watching … Our object has been to take a snapshot of the future, framing some of the personalities whose creativity or talent or brains or leadership will make a difference in the years ahead.”

Daines certainly gets high marks in the “brains” category.

The magazine’s entry on Daines, 52, says, “Wish there were more nanoseconds in a day? Daines, founder of Packet Engines, is your man. His ‘gigabit ethernet’ technology would allow you to download that file 10 times faster than you can now.”

Daines is among the world’s leading authorities on breaking speed limits on the information highway.

The “ethernet” is the standard technology used to link personal computers together into networks. Back in the ‘80s, when PCs were emerging, Daines played a key role in creating the hardware that made computer networks possible.

In 1992, as a co-founder of a company called Grand Junction, Daines played a critical role in creating the technology that allowed computers in a network to exchange information at the rate of 100 megabits per second rather than 10 megabits per second. Industry giant Cisco Systems bought Grand Junction for $350 million in 1995.

Daines founded Packet Engines to make the next leap in velocity. The company is creating hardware that will allow computer networks to exchange information at the rate of 100 megabits - or one gigabit - per second.

Daines said Wednesday he has no idea how he came to Newsweek’s attention. But the gigabit ethernet concept has been a hot topic in national news magazines recently. Business Week recently featured the technology in one of its issues.

But Daines welcomes the publicity for his company. Anything helps, he said, in the fierce competition among a number of companies - including industry powerhouses - to get gigabit ethernet products onto the market.

“It’s a very crowded market,” Daines said, “and we expect it to be a pretty bloody area.”

The edge Packet Engines has, he says, will be in range of products and pricing.

Most competitors are focusing on individual elements of the gigabit ethernet system. Packet Engines, though, is developing a full range of products to complete a network.

Its first two products are a circuit board including a custom-designed integrated circuit that allows a PC to send and receive information at a one gigabit rate, and a switch that will act as a hub tying together a high speed network.

Those two products will debut at the Networld+Interop trade show in Las Vegas May 6-8.

“Our next product is a switch that will be bigger than anyone else is building that will be the top of the market,” Daines said. “So we will bracket the market.”

Of course this race to be first with the best is expensive. But Daines said fund-raising efforts have exceeded the company’s expectations.

Its second round of private funding, he said, is “oversubscribed by millions of dollars.

“So now it’s just a matter of figuring out what to do. Perhaps we will be able to do more things and bigger things than we were planning.”

Daines said he still plans to take the company public with an initial stock offering, probably during the next 12 months.

, DataTimes