Maranti Hires SAN Virtuoso

Storage switch startup Maranti Networks has hired James Kuenzel, former VP of engineering at McData Corp. (Nasdaq: MCDTA), to crank up its engineering effort and -- it hopes -- ship its product by mid-2003 (see Maranti Names Engineering VP, CTO).

Kuenzel, who accepted the VP of engineering post in December, will oversee both hardware and software development at Maranti. He has sole responsibility for whipping the company's engineering team into action to deliver a product by midyear. The switch is expected to enter trials this quarter, according to Maranti's VP of marketing, Harish Nayak.

Kuldeep Sandhu, Maranti's co-founder, president, and CEO, who had been overseeing hardware, hands this responsibility off to Kuenzel. Santosh Lolayekar, formerly the company's VP of software, will now assume the role of CTO.

Kuenzel is the ideal man for the job, says Nayak. "We now have someone with overall control... who has delivered these products to market before and has networking and storage experience." Kuenzel was at McData for three years and at Cabletron Systems before that.

Maranti was founded in October 2000 with $6 million from Alliance Ventures. It received a second round of $25 million from Menlo Ventures and Trinity Ventures in December 2001, for a total of $31 million. Unsurprisingly, a year later, with 75 employees on board and no sign of revenues any time soon, Maranti is looking for more investment (see Maranti Scores $25 Million and Maranti's Momentum Flags)."We have enough to get the product out before we will need another round," Nayak says. "Hiring Jim was part of this process."

Kuenzel says he took the job at Maranti because its product is aimed squarely at the sweet spot for intelligent storage switching. When we asked him about this product, and whether there was room for another company in this space, given Brocade Communications Systems Inc.'s (Nasdaq: BRCD) acquisition of Rhapsody and Cisco Systems Inc.'s (Nasdaq: CSCO) entrance with Andiamo, he got a little bit annoyed (see Brocade Scoops Up Rhapsody, Cisco Buys Andiamo, and IBM Tells Cisco: 'Let's Go!').

"It's an early market. There's always opportunity," he grouched. (Apparently, we caught him before his first cup of coffee this morning, as he hung up pretty fast.)

Nayak says Maranti's product goes beyond what Rhapsody's or Cisco's MDS 9000 switches can do. "It's truly a Layer 3, application-aware switch," he says. In other words, it should be able to recognize data types and prioritize traffic accordingly. IT managers will be able to use the Maranti switch to assign different performance, scaleability, and security parameters to electronic resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), email, and workgroup applications.

Companies like InterSAN Inc. and CreekPath Systems Inc. are creating software that lets companies apply policies, which Maranti says can be enforced with its switch (see Maranti Makes a Monster).Next up, Maranti is planning to partner with all the major software players in the ERP, CRM, email, and workgroup markets in order for its switch to be useful. "That's our execution strategy for the next three months," Nayak says.

Another potential outcome for Maranti: Kuenzel's recruitment could pave the way for McData to buy the startup. Given McData's apparent lack of strategy for switch-based storage services, this is certainly a possibility.

McData believes "at least initially they could use their current architecture to provide some of these [virtualization] services," according to Jason Ader, an analyst with Thomas Weisel Partners