The eQuilibrium 2500 is priced at $89,500. If that seems a bit steep for a box to speed up streaming media traffic, Surgient's Rao insists it's not. "Add up how much a company spends on load balancers, Web switches, servers, and storage switches for this purpose, he advises.
Rao says that down the line the box will increase in value by supporting other applications that are I/O intensive, such as databases from Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq: ORCL). This in turn will lead to a range of new uses for the device. For example, enterprises could deploy the 2500 to perform tasks such as accounting chargeback, Rao suggests.
With 140 employees onboard, Surgient has the credentials on the engineering and management side to back up its claims. Founder and CTO Scott Conrad Johnson founded Thomas Conrad, a manufacturer of high speed access devices acquired by Compaq Computer Corp. (NYSE: CPQ). Two other principal engineers founded NetSpeed, acquired by Cisco. Bob Fernander, VP of sales and chief marketing officer, ran the enterprise storage group at Compaq, and CEO Nagi Rao led McKinsey & Companys
worldwide communications group before founding Telecom Technologies, which he sold to Sonus Networks Inc. (Nasdaq: SONS).
Jo Maitland, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch
http://www.byteandswitch.com