Surprisingly, for a company whose business model was predicated on shipping network kits to the dot-com economy, Foundry has weathered the storm pretty well. The way Johnson tells it, a massive 50 percent growth in the company's enterprise business has almost compensated for the disintegration of its service provider revenue, letting the company actually stay profitable.
"Since the end of 2000, we have felt the pinch." said Johnson. "At that point we had 65 percent of our revenue from service providers, and 35 percent from the enterprise. Today, 75 percent to 80 percent of our revenue comes from the enterprise. We still have large service providers, such as AOL and the metro networks, but there is no Web hosting business left."
The enterprise growth has been helped by FastIron, a bunch of products tailored to the enterprise, launched at the start of 2002. These are transparently Foundry's service provider products, cut down to fit into company networks. "They are cost-reduced versions, but have the same fabric and the same software," said Johnson. For example, the FastIron 1500 costs 35 percent less than the service-provider version, the BigIron 15000. The difference is in the scalability, the number of routers it can support, and the memory. It should be good enough for an enterprise, but for a service provider, with a high number of customers, to use it "would be dangerous," said Johnson.
If enterprises need to move up a scale, they can plug in BigIron modules, but service providers can't cut corners by trying to get by with FastIron blades.
Enterprise themes
The main themes in the enterprise are integrated voice over IP, security features, and what Johnson calls "Webification." By this, he means the use of higher-level Layer 4 to 7 functions, for load balancing and streaming. These were originally intended for service providers, but it turns out that enterprises have a use for them--if nothing else because the service providers are no longer there to provide them for enterprises that wanted them.
You could sum the benefits up as tidying up racks, agrees Johnson. "Any market goes through a period of consolidation," he said. "In the short term, the economic environment will stifle investment and racks will get clearer. There's a focus on meat and potatoes, and no budget for dessert."
The security pitch is based on Foundry's ability to look deeply into network traffic, picking up information from the higher layers of the network model. "We are the leader in deployment of deep packet scan technology," said Johnson. Among other things, this can shrug off denial of service attacks, where attackers swamp servers with multiple spurious requests, because at one level or another it will be obvious that they are not all genuine individual requests. The switches can also load-balance between firewalls and other security devices.
ZDNet expressed surprise that VoIP was such a big part of Foundry's plans, as we have yet to see much of it: "A couple of years ago, I was cynical myself," said Johnson. "But integration is real. People do want that cost saving. We are doing it; we have that religion."
Of course, at around 10k per voice channel, VoIP is not going to sell many extra 10Gig links--each one could hold a million voices. But green-field sites are increasingly installing integrated networks from the start, said Johnson.
One such site is the Greater London Authority building, set up next to Tower Bridge by Mayor Ken Livingstone--although in fact Foundry's partner there, Mitel, has put in traditional PBXs which will be replaced in due course. Migration and partnership is a better strategy, said Johnson: "Cisco would make you rip out your PBXs."
The other factor that may eventually drive users to VoIP is that the evolution of PBXs may simply draw to a close, with companies like Mitel moving across to integrated networks: "Even the PBX manufacturers aren't building the next generation of PBXs," said Johnson.
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