Client Success Stories

In one capacity or another, this same team with this same leadership has done many successful consulting and advisory projects over the years.

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Networking Hardware Company Engagements

    Our Managing Director was both a product Business Unit VP/GM at Cisco and most recently served as a direct report to the Corporate CTO as VP/GM of Cloud Computing for the company. Three other Cloud Strategy Partners associates are former employees of Cisco at various levels.

    A consulting project to develop voice over IP and Telco interoperability strategy. This project was very early on on the VOIP days and led to 3Com's participatiion in SIP and H.323 standards.

    Finisar is an optical networks testing company. Developing software architecture for new generation of 1, 2, and 10G SAN and LAN testing HW. Strategy and Business Development (M&A) work for SAN protocols and software – led deals for Finisar to acquire both Data Transit Inc, and InterSAN Inc.an optical networks testing company.

    Pluris was a manufacturer of Terabit Network Routers. Retained as contract-CEO after the initial $3 million investment by the VC board to develop a prototype and seek a larger next round. We built a gate-array prototype Ethernet router using core software and switch fabric topology we developed. I raised $24 million in a second round. Grew the company from 10 to 145 people. Led design of optical backplane and 10G ASIC design. Assisted the board in recruiting big name CEO. Company raised an additional $225 million in VC funding. Went under after .com crash.

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    Intelliden is a privately held network management company providing large scale provisioning, configuration and change management, and compliance solutions for large service providers. Project was for architecture for their next generation platform, to help them scale their system to handle even larger networks than today’s service providers are faced with.

    Retained by Oak Venture Partners, to assist in pre-investment diligence, and Strategic Planning and Competitive Analysis. Inktomi made search engine software and content-cache software which was purchased and installed by Service Providers.

    BSDi was one of the first open-source UNIX companies. Their system was widely used in networking equipment as an embedded OS as well as the basis for Service Profider SMTP, DNS, DHCP, and other core IP networking servers. Retained by BSDi to develop a more embedded strategy whihc resulted in their acquistion by Windriver Systems.

    This well funded, mobile wallet start-up in Redwood City wanted to acquire a rapidly growing “Social Money” start-up based in Seattle. They retained us to coach the founders and manage the attorneys from LOI to purchase agreement as well as to map out the integration strategy.

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 Service Provider Engagements

    2-year software project to develop the next generation WorldNet platform for AT&T. Company was supposed to spin off as an independent entity; wrote the business plan. AT&T envisioned a world-wide syndicated premium-services Internet enabled by common platform technology much as the 5ESS voice switch. designed and built the platform out of Sun servers and Java technology. This platform included AT&T’s first e-commerce software, and AT&T’s first voice-over-IP software and hardware (which we built). With AT&T corporate assistance, did cooperation agreements and installed a prototype worldwide network including AT&T headquarters in New Jersey, NTT in Tokyo, DT in Berlin, and Telia in Stockholm. Ran the network from our datacenter in San Jose. AT&T declared the project a successful research initiative but did not commercialize.

    Assisted DSL.net in the acquisition of a central California ISP called Tycho Networks. Tycho Networks had co-location, DSL subscribers, ISDN subscribers, and some leased line subscribers inclusing downstream regional ISP's. Tycho Networks also had a strategic floorspace in the MAE-West exchange facility in ZDowntown San Jose with direct peering to AOL, UUnet, Verrizon, GTE, and serveral other Tier-One IP transit providers.

    Assisted OnStar with the deployment of GPS-enabled call center software operating over pre-installed mobile cellular subscribers. Call center included both voice and data services for various vehicl systems.

     Varolii (formerly Par3) is late-stage startup in the outbound, interactive IVR business. Solutions include fraud early warning for CitiCard, flight departure alerts for Delta Airlines, and Payment Reminders for Comcast. Hired to help the CTO re-architect the tooling for this SaaS/hosted service for more rapid service provisioning.

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Large Enterprise Engagements

    Advised Citibank Credit Card call center CTO and staff, with their large scale, redundant computing environment. Needed to design a next generation centralized voice enabled datacenter which could also provide Web interactions, out of contemporary technologies such as Java.

    Advised USAA regarding unified computing strategy using Websphere clustering technologies on an IBM-provided On-Demand datacenter. Included extensive EAI strategies which resulted in an SOA architecture for USAA.

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Venture Capital Engagements

Time to time advice, due diligence, meetings, on various companies of interest to VC firms: