Packet Boss Says Firm Retains Edge Company Executives Happy With Response At Trade Show
Officials of Packet Engines Inc. returned from a major industry trade show last week confident of their position in the technology race to make computer networks operate faster than ever before.
“We find we are pretty much alone in the kind of solution we offer,” Bernard Daines, founder and chief executive officer of the Spokane-based company said Tuesday.
Daines and other key Packet Engine personnel were in Las Vegas last week for the spring Networld+Interop trade show, the key trade show for the worldwide computer networking industry.
Packet Engines is in a technology race with dozens of other companies around the world to produce products that will allow computer networks to exchange information at rates 10 times faster than now possible.
A number of industry experts say Daines and Packet Engines are at the forefront of the race to capitalize on what will become a multibillion-dollar market.
“We got a very good response to what we were talking about,” Daines said. “We kept our booth full the whole time. We found a lot of interest from potential customers and OEMs (original equipment manufacturers).
“Particularly interested were Japanese distributors and end users who see gigabit ethernet going into that (Japanese) market very heavily.”
Daines is a pioneer in the field of hardware that allows personal computers to be linked together into networks. He designed some of the critical equipment that linked computers together at information exchange rates of 10 megabits per second years ago.
He helped create the technology that allowed those networks to jump their speed from 10 to 100 megabits per second only a few years ago.
The next step is increasing that speed of exchange to 1,000 megabits - or one gigabit per second. The standard platform on which these networks are based is called ethernet, thus the term “gigabit ethernet technology.”
The technology is only now emerging, and most of the competitors in the field were aiming at the Las Vegas show to display their progress thus far.
While most of his competitors concentrate on the middle ground of the market, Daines’ strategy has been to produce a less expensive and smaller switch than his competitors on the low end of the market.
Those were the products Packet Engines displayed at the trade show, and they are, indeed, thousands of dollars cheaper than competitive offerings, Daines said.
The second half of that strategy is to next offer a much more complex switch than his competitors. At the show, Packet Engines revealed plans to introduce a family of switch products by the end of this year that will dwarf the capacities being offered by other companies.
The new switches will switch over “50 million packets per second,” while competitors’ products appear to be limited to 7 million packets per second. (A packet, Daines said, is the base unit of ethernet data traffic.)
“When we come out with the bigger switch later in the year,” Daines said, “some of our competitors will be trying to get there, too. But most of them will be preoccupied (with the smaller switches.)”
This approach is one of the things that has impressed investors in Packet Engines thus far. The huge switch Daines will bring out late this year will not find its market until mid-1998, he believes.
Until then, the smaller switches will provide all the capacity this emerging technology needs. But, Daines said, “as large backbone demand emerges in 1998, a different level of performance will be required.”
As Daines has said, the key to competitiveness in this high-tech arena is market anticipation. If a company waits until the demand for a product has arrived to produce the product, development times are such that the product may already be obsolete when it comes out.
, DataTimes