Optical Networking Startup Offers Strategy Clues
Start-Up company Monterey Networks Inc. has entered the optical networking scene, scheming to make a new product that facilitates Internet protocol (IP) networking over dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) equipment.
"It will be some kind of bandwidth management device," explains Monterey President and CEO Joe Bass. It won't necessarily be an optical switch or a crossconnect, he adds, but it will perform some of the same "traffic cop" functions of provisioning, restoration, and management. The company plans to deliver product in late 1999.
The marquis prospects for Monterey technology are new service providers like Frontier, IXC, Level 3, and Qwest, all of which seek to build IP-optimized fiber networks while reducing the number of network elements required to do the job, Bass explains. Traditional carriers that build overlay networks are also top prospects, he adds.
Formed in mid-1997 by Silicon Valley technology veterans, Monterey pulled Bass from Alcatel, where he finished up his 15-year tenure with the company as general manager of the Optical Networks Business Unit. At Monterey, he describes the design team as having a clean slate on which to draw up a networking solution, without the influence of legacy technology.
"We're having some of the damnedest conversations you can imagine," Bass says of the discussions between data-minded and telco-minded engineers on the Monterey staff. He describes the data networking view toward network upgrades as buiding a better network every year and throwing away obsolete equipment, while the telco crowd wants to carefully adopt new technology and leverage all existing equipment. "Somewhere in the middle is the answer—that's what we're trying to find out," he concludes.
Monterey, which currently has 35 employees, expects to grow its staff to more than 75 in the next six months, chiefly through the addition of engineering personnel. The founding team consists of former employees of router company Sourcecom, including Michael Zadikian, vice president of marketing; Ali Saleh, chief systems architect; Zareh Baghdasarian, vice president of engineering; and Vahid Parsi, senior systems architect.
In May 1998, Monterey raised $10 million in first-round venture funding from Communications Ventures (whose partners have backed PairGain Technologies, Tellabs, Ciena, and Advanced Fibre Communications), JAFCO America Ventures (Advanced Fibre, Ciena), Sequoia Capital (Cisco, Stratacom, Yahoo!) and Sevin Rosen Funds (Ciena, Compaq, Lotus).