SM: What year did you sell? MT: We sold it in 2005. Today the business is number two in revenue behind Juniper in the SSL VPN market. When we started we were probably the 30th company to enter that space. We were definitely not early to market, we were very late to the market. However,
SM: What was the idea of Net6. MT: The original premise is very straight forward. We launched during the peak of the dot com boom. Back then it was all about grabbing eyeballs, and the next class of eyeballs to be grabbed was mobile eyeballs. Most companies founded in that timeframe focused on building middleware.
Timing is an essential aspect of any successful venture. Attempt to launch the venture too soon and the market may not exist or be mature enough to sustain your venture. Enter the market too late and you are bound to be fighting competition. Murli Thirumale has repeatedly brought high technology to the market, and recounts
SM: You have market potential to build a pretty big business. Is that what you want to do? FW: I want to build a profitable and sustainable business. We do not want to grow too fast. Our strategy is to have the right technology, the right architecture and the right product mix in the right
SM: You have been doing this for two years, where are you in terms of products? FW: We don’t produce the DIMM, we produce controller chips. We sell controller chips to DIMM makers. Our partners today are Smart Modular Technologies and Hynix. They take their DRAM, put it on a board with our chips to
SM: How does MetaRam fit your golden rules? FW: I often say the main rule golden rule is “CPUs should talk directly to DRAMs is because that is how God intended it to be, and you should not get in the middle of it”! That is why it can be surprising when you look at
SM: Chip design does not have to be a labor intensive process. FW: No it doesn’t, but it can be. You can very easily apply too many people. You need a lot of people for complex chips, so there is always a temptation to use too many people. The problem is you then run into
SM: What was significant about your time at AMD for both yourself and the industry? FW: It was a time that brought about the absolute consolidation and predominance of microprocessors. In the 1980’s the RISC processors and single chip processors where gaining importance but there were still mainframes in multiple architectures. By the mid 90’s