"It doesn't scare me to compete with Cisco," insists Selina Lo, with a cheerful but unmistakably dismissive turn of her head. That makes Alteon Networks's VP of product management and marketing either foolhardy or very clever.
Alteon was founded in 1996 by four engineers with a bright idea, albeit an idea that some 20 other companies were also pursuing: a gigabit Ethernet switch for local-area networking. Most of these start-ups were about as real as a Hollywood set, consisting of a few engineers hankering to be acquired; those that weren't snapped up by companies like Cisco simply disbanded.
But San Jose, California-based Alteon is thriving on its own. While its technological bells and whistles get most of the attention, it's market-savvy Selina Lo, behind the scenes, who deserves much of the credit.
The scrappy, Hong Kong-raised Lo doesn't have the managerial gravitas of Alteon CEO Dominic Orr (although she did cofound networking switchmaker Centillion). Nor does she possess the technical chops of Alteon's founders (although she has a degree in computer science from UC Berkeley). What she does have, according to former coworker Dan Warmenhoven, is an incredible knack for positioning a product directly in front of an undiscovered, oncoming market.
"A networking start-up can't really succeed," explains Lo, "unless there is some fundamental shift going on in the industry."
For Alteon, that shift is the emergence of Web browsing -- and the giant Web servers required to make it work. Under Lo, Alteon is emphasizing its gigabit Ethernet switch's ability to manage and groom traffic before handing it to the server. This makes Alteon the world's only "server switch" company, not just another gigabit Ethernet company.
That's more than semantic gymnastics: It takes Alteon out of Cisco's direct path and gives the tiny start-up a chance to compete. And for Lo, who already made millions with her previous start-up, that's the fun part.
This article originally appeared in the May issue of Wired magazine.
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