That was the business problem. Along the way I hooked up with my three other founders. They have a demand for IP, with backlogs every month in actually servicing the orders for DSL connectivity, for T1s and T3s. To actually build a distributed system to provision and monitor services above the physical network, service providers needed to get a different kind of engineering talent into the organization. We thought the time was ripe to create a company that focused just on this problem.
Many people think that the Internet is ubiquitous.
But as a networking technology, it only represents about 20 percent of the data networking that corporations do today. Most of the remaining 80 percent is integrating of branch offices, so they can run their applications between their various offices. This has traditionally been done with frame relay, which in the early 1990s was a new disruptive technology for replacing private, leased lines. While frame is massively deployed, it's generally at the large corporate level. It's hard for small and medium-sized businesses to get frame relay networks.