[GTER] Procket Reaches "End of Life"

[Rodrigo Loureiro]

Para quem tinha algum nivel de interesse sobre o fim da Procket, ai vai
uma thread entre o ex-CEO Randall Krupp e o cientista-chefe e fundador
Toni Li. Acho que a empresa era pequena demais para o ego dos dois !!!


[]'s
--

Rodrigo


Author:  Tony Li IGNORE AUTHOR Number: 28  Rating:  
Subject: Re: Procket Coda Date: 07/20/04 02:02 AM 
  Rate This Post: 12345 



Doc,

Thanks for eulogy, but I think that there are some very valuable lessons
to be learned here and I don't want to see them glossed over. I think
that the biggest single problem that we had was the inability to sell to
the executive level. We had a good, working product, we had buy-in from
the customers at the engineering level, but we were unable to achieve
traction at the executive level. As you point out, the result is no
meaningful market share and from there it's academic.

Regards,
Tony
 

Article Talk
Procket Reaches 'End of Life'


      Author: Randall_K IGNORE AUTHOR Number: 36  Rating:
      Subject: Re: Procket Coda Date: 07/20/04 03:50 PM
        Rate This Post: 12345


        Ahh Tony,

        So easy to dismiss your failure as a problem of sales. It's nice
to
be able to sit back and point fingers at someone else. Instead of
whining
about how Procket failed because my sales folks didn't have the right
contacts, let's look at reality:

        1. Product was introduced way late because of problems with the
chipset. Allowed Juniper to get the jump with the T-series and snatch up
all
of the early adopters needing 40G per slot routing. What happened to all
of
the "friends & family of Tony" who you told me were going to buy Procket
routers? All we ever got out of that bunch was a good bending over.

        2. Architectual decision to use only onboard memory for lookups.
Severly limited what could fit in the forwarding table. So my sales guys
had
to sell around your "size" issue with something like "Don't worry, Mr.
Customer, I know that 250k entries in the FIB isn't anywhere near the
minimum 1 million entries you specify in your RFP, but Tony Li is
confident
that this will be plenty to last at least 7 years".

        3. Bias against MPLS VPNs and the refusal to implement them in
the
product. This is one that I never understood. I told you over and over
we
were gonna do this, and you flat refused. Never mind that large
customers
are deploying them NOW and MAKING MONEY off of them. Because you didn't
think it was the "right" solution, you refused to even consider the
strategic implications of not implementing them. Screw the customer,
he's
obviously an idiot for wanting to deploy something that makes him money.

        4. Complete lack of "core" software features until release 2.3.
Forget about feature parity, until the 2.3 release the procket sw was so
feature poor no customer in their right mind was seriously considering
buying procket until 2.3. How many times did I hear you say in meetings
"The
software's done, now just waiting on the hardware".

        5. Calling it the PRO/8812 High-Availablity router when it
didn't
even support basic HA features. How is it a highly available router when
it
didn't support in-service software upgrades, hitless RP or switch card
failover, or even graceful restart extentions? I probably should have
called
it the not-so-highly-available router thanks-to-tony-li instead.

        6. Having one of the founders of the company publically announce
their intent to resign multiple times. Nothing like taking the wind out
of
your sales after announcing a win like AARnet than to have a founder of
the
company resign by broadcasting it to the entire company. Forget about
professionalism, you only think about yourself and not the rest of the
people around you who really did the work.

        7. Turning down the opportunity to sell the company to Alcatel
when
I gave the chance. I had the deal closed until you decided to step in
and
kill it and take me out at the same time. How much again was that deal
for?
$500M? Over 5 times more that what procket sold for just one year
later!!!
We would have both made something off of the deal, not to mention there
would still be procket product being sold and deployed. But no, your
company
was worth at least $1.2B you said to me.

        Frankly, the net of the net is that you were way more of a
liability
to procket than you ever were as an asset, not to mention a major pain
in my
ass. The difference between you and the other great engineers at procket
is
that they did what was required of them without the drama. I should have
axed you after the first week..

        Thanks for nothing, Tony.

        Randall K.

        PS - Don't bother applying at my new gig either; I know that was
you
calling last week and bugging my secretary about a "really great
engineer
looking for work".
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Maiores detalhes em:

http://www.lightreading.com/boards/message.asp?msg_id=107863

http://www.lightreading.com/boards/message.asp?msg_id=107887