Networking is having its heyday in Silicon Valley as startups pushing programmable networks raise millions and venture firms are on the lookout for the next big thing in IT infrastructure. There are three big trends coalescing in the space that are driving this excitement, and Pica8 hopes to take advantage of them all.
One is the rise of merchant silicon that can deliver the performance of custom chips made by the likes of Cisco and Juniper, but at a lower cost. Another is the rise of software-defined networking, which separates the physical network infrastructure from management of that network. Finally, networks are getting bigger and doing so faster, and that is creating pressure on systems adminsitrators to find a way to scale their networks faster and buy the gear more cheaply.
Pica8, a two-year-old startup that spun out of server maker Quanta last month, hopes to become the anti-Cisco by pushing networking gear made on the merchant silicon available from Broadcom, Marvell and Fulcrum. The promise of cheaper boxes is enough for some folks, but James Liao, the CEO of Pica8 has a more disruptive plan — to build software for the white box networking gear and then open that up to the industry as a whole. It’s taking the vision of Arista, which began in 2008 and puts its own software on top of boxes it builds using merchant silicon, one step further. And in the process, Pica8 will shave away at industry margins.
Liao wouldn’t disclose the price of the Pica8 boxes, but sources say they will run from 20 percent to 60 percent less than gear from Cisco, Force10 or others. Already, Pica8 has customers, including NTT communications and Baidu, as well as a strategic partner in Quanta, which is making the Pica8 boxes. Pica8 will also work with another Taiwanese or Chinese white box maker to deliver its software to another vendor.
Liao would like to work with more, but with 15 engineers and himself, he’s strapped for resources. To help, he’s hoping to complete a $ 5 million round of funding in a few months that will help the company expand.
The new networking trend
Networking has been somewhat of a black box for businesses for years. The boxes contained proprietary chips known as ASICs that were able to handle the speeds required to send packets around a network, and used proprietary software that required specialized skills to program. All this specialization made networking both pricey (for customers) and profitable (for providers). But about two years ago, the chips from providers like Broadcom and Fulcrum, which Intel bought, began to match that quality and performance of the specialized ASICs made by Juniper and Cisco.
And with those chips came an opening for a change in the network. Arista picked up on it and began selling boxes built on the commodity silicon while Google built its own switches using merchant silicon, as well. And with these cracks in their chip business, it became possible to build boxes that didn’t require a multi-million-dollar chip investment inside. From there, it becomes a question of software.
Commodity hardware opened up the chance for a vendor like Arista to differentiate with its software. But with OpenFlow controllers and companies like Pica8 pressuring the proprietary software running on networking gear, many companies are seeing an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a revolution. Pica8 hopes to be one of those startups, and with backing from Quanta, which itself is disrupting the server business, it’s one to watch.
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