Rock Stars, Billionaires and Their "Gigs"

I find it part amusing and part puzzling that companies in the technology business (particularly those based in The Silicon Valley) with an unproven track record (particularly in these trying times, when reality has hit home in more ways than one) rely on associations with rock stars, billionaires, and former SVPs from Cisco to garner instant market credibility.

Perhaps it is simply that I have just not lived in Silicon Valley long enough. Be that as it may, today I am very fortunate to work for a very "Un-Silicon Valley" company. We BLADErs are like the "Un-Cola" in a "Cola" world, and I would like to share a few things about our company with you that I think might be of interest.

At BLADE Network Technologies there are no Silicon Valley "rock stars," celebrity billionaires, or ex-Cisco executives, only the most talented and hungry people in the industry with a passion to serve our customers.

BLADE is a very meat-and-potatoes company where every employee gets up in the morning and asks him or herself one question that becomes their work guide for the day, what am I going to do today to solve a pressing customer problem?

We've always believed that if we do the right thing by our customers the right things will happen to BLADE. That is why Customer Satisfaction is listed ahead of the other six core values of our young company.

While we do not enjoy the privilege of being associated with billionaires that enjoy rock star like celebrity status (Sun: ~~Elvis~~ Andy has not left the building), and don't have the ability to brag that ex-SVPs from Cisco are among our management team, this "Un-Silicon Valley" company has steadily and quietly accomplished some very meaningful things, right here in the heart of The Silicon Valley.

I want to take the opportunity to share our successes with you as this will provide you with a good perspective on how we stack up against Arista Networks.

But before we go there, here is a little trivia for you. Did you know that the name "Arista" is a record label owned by Sony Entertainment? And do you know what the word "Arista" means in Sanskrit?

BLADE's list of accomplishments includes:

First vendor in the industry to ship Layer 2-3, Layer 2-7, 10GE uplink, all 10GE, and VMready, blade server switches.
Close to 5,000,000 ports in production deployment.
Our switches provide connectivity to over 1 million servers in the data center.
Over half of the Fortune 500 use BLADE products.
BLADE switches are used by over 5,000 customers across 26 different industries.
The actual MTBF of our products exceeds 5 million hours vs. a goal of 400,000 hours.
BLADE's market share of Ethernet switch options for HP and IBM blade servers is greater than 45%.
Our share of Ethernet switch options on NEC blade servers is 59%.
We've set the record for best price performance on 10GE switches, at less than $500/port.
While the rest of the industry is talking about network virtualization, BLADE is delivering the world's most advanced Network Virtualization software "SmartConnect".
Our BLADEHarmony Manager, software was voted by CRN Magazine as one of the "12 Hot Products To See At LinuxWorld," August 2008.
BLADE's unique concept of "Rackonomics" is the first approach that enables enterprises to design, provision and replicate servers, data network infrastructures and storage area networks (SANs) rack by rack to decrease the total cost of ownership of data center infrastructures, reduce IT complexity and enable incremental scalability.
We were the first to introduce a top-of-rack 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch ("RackSwitch") to support the network virtualization that will be vital as enterprises make the move to virtualized data centers.
Our RackSwitch line of products is the preferred Ethernet switch offering for the IBM iDataPlex and Verari BladeRack platforms.
Our new top-of-rack RackSwitch G8000 1/10G aggregation switch offers (The Tolly Group competitive evaluation):
- 3x lower latency than Cisco
- 100% line rate on all tests compared to Cisco
- 30% less energy consumption compared to Cisco
- 2.1x better price performance
Our new top-of-rack RackSwitch G810010G low latency switch offers (The Tolly Group competitive evaluation):
- 12.4x lower latency than Cisco
- 100% line rate on all tests unlike Cisco which achieved less than 50% on 2 out of 3 tests
- 73% less energy consumption compared to Cisco (50% lower power consumption compared to comparable product from Arista/Arastra)
- 6.5x better price performance Compared to Cisco
We've won the following 10 prestigious industry awards:
- Frost & Sullivan Product Innovation of the Year Award 2008
- Network Products Guide - Hot Companies 2008
- EE Times ACE Award - Startup of the Year 2008
- Info Security Products Guide - Hot Companies 2008
- AlwaysOn's "Going Green 100" Award 2007 (first networking company to win)
- Red Herring - 100 North America Winner 2007
- Red Herring - 100 Global Winner 2007
- Byte & Switch - Top 10 Startups to Watch 2007
- CRN - Emerging Tech Dynamos 2007
- Info Security Products Guide - Hot Companies 2007
- Network and Communications Guide - "Hot Company" 2007
Most impressively, in our current and running fiscal quarter Q4 2008 (Aug-Oct), we've already shipped over 500,000 ports, with approximately 15% of our shipment revenues coming from our 10GE products.
BLADE is the "gold standard" among partners.

By contrast, our friends at Arastra/Arista have been in business two years longer than we have. Where is their list of what theyâ€™ve done for customers and the industry?

BLADErs are not rock stars or billionaires, and we're not into "gigs". We're just a scrappy bunch that lives to solve next generation virtualized data center problems and delight our customers.

CEO Blog

Monday, October 27, 2008

Rock Stars, Billionaires and Their "Gigs"

0 Comments:

Comment on this blog