Riverstone's CEO outlines his post-IPO strategy
 
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While some CEOs of network equipment firms may see doom and gloom in their markets, Riverstone Networks' Romulus Pereira sees morning again in the metropolitan-area network arena.
In an interview with Network World, Pereira outlined the opportunities he sees to sell his switches, specifically in the data centers of application service providers (ASPs). He's banking on upcoming 10G Ethernet and OC-768 products that could help MAN providers and ASPs ease their bottleneck woes.
"The metropolitan area market is enjoying its own microclimate" apart from the spending slowdown in long-haul, Pereira says.
Tough economic times may prompt companies to outsource application and data center processing to MAN service providers and ASPs, he says. Also, large carriers aren't making enough money by selling bandwidth or long-distance.
When Pereira talks about the bandwidth requirements that MAN service providers and ASPs need now, and will need in the immediate future, he throws around some big numbers.
"The hosting and [outsourced] data center people want to put in multiple 10 Gigabit rings ASAP. If they could have OC-768 today, they'd put it in," he says.
Pereira says Riverstone will have what MAN providers want when it ships a 10G Ethernet module for its RS 38000 MAN aggregation switch in August. Going a step further, Pereira says the company's next-generation aggregation box, which is in development right now, will have a slot for a 40G bit/sec, or OC-768, module. He says the next-generation switch is on track for release in the first half of next year, and that it will have a switch fabric with up to one terabit per second of bandwidth. The new switch is likely to be targeted at MAN providers who are aggregating multiple 10 Gigabit networks for connection to the Internet core.
Although he acknowledges that the ASP market has had troubles recently, Pereira says he sees an opportunity for his company to help ASPs rebuild their networks with Riverstone gear.
"Usually you have to learn to crawl before you can walk," he says. "[The ASP] market started running before it had any legs. There were no boxes in their networks to really guarantee any kind of [service-level agreements]."
Pereira cites collocation businesses such as Jamcracker, Loudcloud and SightSmith as companies that tried to jump onto the ASP bandwagon but did not have the equipment to fine-tune bandwidth for applications. Although he wouldn't name names, Pereira says several ASPs are experimenting with Riverstone equipment in an effort to overhaul their infrastructures.
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