TIA Member Spotlight:

TIA welcomes one of its newest members, Astute Networks!

Astute Networks is a venture-funded, pre-revenue start up backed by prestigious venture capital firms including Sevin Rosen Funds, Tallwood Venture Capital, Scale Venture Partners, KeyNote Ventures and U.S. Venture Partners (USVP). Our mission is to be the industry’s trusted provider of edge storage solutions to telco, government and medical markets worldwide. We are designing storage solutions targeted specifically to tackle the most demanding applications served to the edge of the network. Our product, the Caspian Family of ATCA storage blades, is the industry's first storage solution that builds in high reliability, high performance, rack density and deployment simplicity, all on open standards. It's an exciting time at Astute Networks. We're placing our products in customers' hands for early evaluations and getting really positive feedback.

Clark Masters, CEO, spoke with TIA Network staff about Astute Networks.

Please tell us the value you gain from your TIA membership.

As a venture capital-funded company designing and selling ATCA storage blades in the telecommunications market, it is critical for us to stay abreast of the industry trends, market dynamics, technologies, and telecommunications standards and policies. To do this efficiently and reliably, Astute Networks looks to TIA as a prominent source of information and industry exchange. As an example of the latter, we find value in participating at TIA conferences such as NXTcomm. Along with our partners such as Sun Microsystems, Alliance and Kontron, we will be exhibiting integrated ATCA server/storage solutions designed for the next generation telco applications (IPTV, IMS) at this year's conference in Las Vegas. We look forward to expanding our involvement with TIA, as well as to utilizing the resources made available through our membership.

How is Astute Networks addressing current trends in the industry? What are you doing to get ahead of the competition? Is the current economic environment affecting your company, and what are you doing to address the challenges?

In today's telco market we see several overarching market and technology drivers. Convergence of voice, video and data are driving up complexity. At the same time, customers are pushing equipment vendors to simplify the total environment in order to drive down their TCO. Competitive pressures are forcing telco providers to search for new sources of revenue and to rapidly deliver more content/services – all in the same footprint, and with quicker time to market. These technology challenges, coupled with the market dynamics, are not straightforward. Technology providers are faced with architectural trade-offs, increasing server/storage ratios, all while needing to be environmentally aware.

How are we addressing these challenges? We're listening to our customers and translating their top requirements into a product designed to handle their technology and business challenges. Our advantage is we've developed IP that allows us to run our storage blades at fiber channel-like speeds, but to run them over the Ethernet backplanes inherent in the ATCA chassis. This provides, for the first time in the industry, a storage blade that performs at 10 Gb speeds without the complexity, costs and limitations of fiber channel.

Our channel for the Caspian ATCA Storage Blade is through network equipment providers, system Integrators and computer system companies – not direct to the consumer. We are working with our channel partners on design wins for future projects that are business critical. At this stage, we are not seeing a slowdown, nor are we extremely sensitive to short term economic fluctuations. In fact, we are seeing increased interest and demand.

In many respects, you could build a case that today's economic pressure is good for a new company or a new solution, because it motivates people to rethink their approach rather than just deploying what was successful yesterday. This fuels innovation and provides a distinct advantage to the most efficient solution, which is good for Astute Networks. 

You recently announced a strategic technology partnership with Kontron. What does this new venture mean for your business and your customers?

We're excited about our strategic technology partnership with Kontron. The partnership arose from the market need for integrated edge computer and storage platforms for IPTV, IMS, HSS and horizontally scalable system applications. Astute Networks and Kontron are working to combine our respective ATCA board level products into one easy-to-deploy solution. The price-performance point achieved by this combination will enable telecom service providers to mass deploy next-generation video services in a more cost-effective manner than can be achieved with proprietary solutions.

We're in the early stages of establishing partnerships to address the diverse market requirements. Expect more exciting partnerships announcements. Kontron is a great example of how we intend to go-to-market with our products. 

What publications do you follow to stay in the know?

As the CEO, I need to keep up with the industry and market trends, the overall business climate and of course, technologies and competition. I follow mostly online pubs and newsletters including publications such as Byte and Switch, TIA, InfoStor, Network Computing, Telecommunications and Light Reading. These are great sources of current information and provide highlights across a broad spectrum of markets and technologies. 

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