Twenty-three years ago, the husband and wife team of Stanford University computer support staffers Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner founded the most powerful and valuable company in networking: Cisco Systems. This week, Bosack rolls out what he believes is another breakthrough product for enterprise networks that may make as much of an impact as Cisco routers. He shared some thoughts on his new product, the DXM optical transport system, and 16-year-old company, XKL LLC, with Network World Managing Editor Jim Duffy.

See also:Cisco founder brings optics to the router guys.

XKL was founded in 1991 to do computer I/O and backplane research. What made you shift gears to optical?

We actually constructed a complete computer system that was a much smaller form factor replacement for a then-obsolete product made by Digital Equipment, which was one of their mainframe systems. So essentially we produced a half-rack unit system that replaced something that was the better part of 20-feet long. We sold a few of those to some of the then remaining customers.

By 2003, it actually appeared as though the industry was ready to deliver on some of those promises (made during the bubble years of 1999-2002) in a way that we could see how to build a dense economical system that could be used by network builders as opposed to just telephone companies. So we took a lot of the work that we had been doing and tried to produce a really dense, potentially economical system. We were making a wager that the optical component makers could both deliver upon their promises and that they could actually do something that they were never very good at – make the price go down. And here we are almost four-and-a-half years later…

So you see a lot of press releases from people saying the bright, bright future is here and it’s all wonderful and it’s easy to do and "Gee, why aren’t we going from 40Gbps to 100Gbps because 40G is so yesterday?" That’s just not the truth.

So DXM is intended to bring optics to enterprise network builders with the familiarity of a Cisco router?

The people that we are probably going to sell the most of these devices to already have multiple campuses that already are buying multiple DS-3s. There are three prongs to the thinking about this product. One of them is an economic fact: A lot of fiber went into the ground during the bubble and (the people deploying it) didn’t really have a coherent vision as to what they were going to do with it. The financial results of that is that the current owners of these bits of glass in the ground can charge a pretty reasonable lease fee and feel that they’re getting an excellent return on their invested capital.