SM: Jonathan, let’s start with your background and your personal story. JB: I grew up in New York City. Medicine was the only career that nobody had done yet in my family, so I figured that would be a good career for me. I could be the best in my family in my profession and
SM: Was Atrica focused on service providers as well? VR: We were focused on helping businesses get broadband services like high-speed data. We thought Ethernet would be driven by the broadband requirements of businesses and homes and expected that businesses would come first, which indeed happened.
SM: You moved on from Redback in May of 2001. What came next? VR: I joined Atrica, which was about Ethernet. When I was at Redback a lot of us were talking about how Ethernet was going to dominate and that SONET would transition into an Ethernet network. Ethernet was already data-centric. The only thing
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