Here we begin to examine the current market segments where the multicore processors are having a significant impact. The two major markets are networking and multimedia applications. SM: Coming back to where your applications are – complex networking applications, and multimedia, right? AA: I don’t know if you want to use the word complex, because
3Com challenged Cisco with a Boundary Router strategy that threatened Cisco’s core router franchise. SM: So what prevented you from finally catching Cisco and passing them? EB: In 1997, there was one major shock for 3Com. More and more enterprise networks had to extend into carrier networks. Enterprises could not build all of these large
M&A and VC activity In February 2007, Sports Illustrated bought a 40% stake in the social networking site FanNation for $25 million, valuing the sports social network at $60 million. FanNation aggregates, filters, and customizes all the relevant player and team content available at any time on the Internet. Sports Illustrated has also entered into
SM: Is this when you began to close the gap on Cisco? EB: There was one play that we used which enabled us to close in on Cisco, and we called it Boundary Routing. Cisco was driven to more complex solutions than us. They positioned routing as something of a magic art, very complicated and
One of the greatest challenges with Massively Parallel Computing is Programmability. Anant explains Tilera’s approach to software and tools in more detail, and his “gentle slope programming” concept. SM: You created all of the tools from scratch, or did you base them on existing tools? AA: We invented all of this, and it is very
SM: Did the market understand your positioning as an integrated networking solution? EB: I think they did. Of course we were coming from behind in routers, and we were behind SynOptics in hubs, and we were behind others in single categories. We started to strengthen our position in all our segments, and this helped because
3Com started growing revenues again in 1992 on the strengths of new products. The company grew about 15 fold in a decade, in terms of revenues, and became profitable again. SM: That was a golden age in networking! EB: Yes, and shareholder value went from the million range to billion range. It was fun, because
SM: In general, was the workforce at 3Com more aligned with your vision than to Krause’s? EB: It was a split workforce. We had some computer experts, and we had some networking experts. What I ended up doing was to choose one – we could not do both. We built upon our roots at Bridge,