SM: How is it that Siara knew the gaps in the Cisco architecture? VR: Ravi came from Cisco, and what really enticed him to come was the chance to build a new routing architecture. His expectation was that it would have all kinds of advantages over the Cisco IOS architecture.
SM: Who was on was your team at Siara? VR: Dave Stiles was the CTO. Mike Yamamura came over from AMD where he ran ASIC development. We had a great software team. We hired Ravi Chandra from Cisco, and he built the whole routing team.
SM: What was the plan to follow on and build upon Fiberlane? VR: In the 1980s and 1990s there was a thing called SONET, which was a standard to carry signals over the fiber networks. It was designed for voice transmission. The Internet required a transition to data transmission. SONET was not initially designed for
SM: Where was this based? VR: I took a VP of Engineering role in Pennsylvania. Cable networks were changing while I was there, from pure video signals to data signals.
Vivek Ragavan is the president and CEO of Siara. He has over 20 years of high-tech experience primarily in telecommunications. Prior to Siara he was president of the Residential Broadband Group of ADC Telecommunications, where he was responsible for $300 million telecommunication equipment businesses. He also led development of General Instrument’s leading digital video transport
SM: You are going for the real idiot-proof user model. TiVo is not idiot-proof. MB: You are starting to hit it! The viewer experience is key. Search is a key component of the overall user experience. The ability for a human being to get the ads she is interested is something new. It is win-win
SM: In terms of an investment thesis, how many millions of dollars has ZillionTV raised? MB: Not going to be speaking to that right now.
SM: The one thing I see in what you have talked about is the user experience. The user interaction with Netflix is fragmented. You are saying that you have cut out the computer and are allowing the entire experience to happen via a remote control. MB: That is one of the key differentiating factors between