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Hammerhead Systems Launches First Products Hammerhead Systems Inc., provider of a data migration edge switch, has launched its first products, the HSX 6000 and Pegador Network Management System. This week's announcement marks the general availability of the products, though their history goes back three years. In May 2001, the company's co-founder and vice president of marketing and business development, Rob Keil, said he began work on the idea of how best to address carriers' needs to transition to multiprotocol label switching, or MPLS, technology, a standard for including routing information in the packets of IP network technology. In the fall of 2001 he joined Foundation Capital as entrepreneur-in-residence and began talking more with carriers and enterprise customers. Keil said enterprise customers were hesitant to move away from existing technology that seemed to work. Carriers, on the other hand, were frustrated with vendors' lack of innovation and expressed interest. In early 2002, Kiel teamed up with co-founder and CTO John Yu and established Hammerhead. Three months later, the company closed its $18 million Series A round from Foundation Capital, Mayfield and Enterprise Partners Venture Capital. After bringing on Joe Sigrist, former president of the edge access systems division at Lucent Technologies Inc., as president and CEO last year in order to drive the company's product development and launch, Hammerhead closed one more round - a $25-million Series B - earlier this year to support additional product development. Almost three years to the date from when Keil began researching the market, the company has launched its products. The HSX 6000 switch and Pegador NMS are designed to enable a service provider to migrate existing data from legacy asynchronous transfer mode, or ATM, networks to an MPLS backbone with their existing networks. They provide Gigabit Ethernet interworking with frame relay and ATM while operating over both ATM and MPLS backbones. The problem the HSX switch is designed to solve, Keil said, is to help carriers migrate to this MPLS backbone without disruption to customers and at lower cost. Competitors like Cisco Systems Inc. and Lucent, he said have aged equipment that's expensive. Keil said Hammerhead's products can reduce the payback period to carriers, in part with something called "bandwidth pooling," a feature of the HSX switch that enables carriers to use all available bandwidth capacity, saving operating costs. Keil said the company is undergoing one trial with a tier one RBOC and another with a network service provider, in addition to several other trials. The HSX switch and Pegador Network Management System are priced starting at $100,000. Hammerhead's $25 million Series B round came from Pequot Ventures, Mayfield, Foundation Capital and Enterprise Partners Venture Capital. To date, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company has raised $43 million. |
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