Randall Kruep, formerly Redback'ssenior vice president of worldwide customer operations, will become Procket's new chief executive andpresident in March. He will replace co-founder Sharad Mehrotra, who willcontinue as chairman.
Procket has created a buzz inthe networking business because of its management team of former CiscoSystems and Sun Microsystems engineers--and because the company has quietlybeen building what some sources believe is next-generation networking equipment that can takeon Cisco and Juniper Networks.
Procket, which has raised $34 million in venture capital, was co-founded byTony Li, a former Cisco and Juniper engineer who created some of the keytechnologies for those companies. The two-year-old start-up was alsoco-founded by former Sun engineers Mehrotra and William Lynch, who designed forthcoming versions of Sun's flagship UltraSparc processors.
Kruep's hiring as CEO will allow the three co-founders to continuedeveloping their product, said Mehrotra in an interview.
"Randall is a topnotch sales executive and brings broad experience as aseasoned executive to take us to the next level," said Mehrotra. "Tony,(William), and I are highly technical. Think of us as high-class technicalnerds. And the product we're working on has tremendous opportunities for usto keep contributing technically. There's no shortage of work."
With Kruep on board, Procket will have an experienced executive who atRedback helped turn a networking start-up into a successful business. Redback, one of many networkingstart-ups that splashed onto Wall Street with successful public offerings,found a niche four years ago by building networking hardware that letstelecommunications service providers offer high-speed Net access throughcable or digital subscriber line (DSL).
Redback, Juniper, Foundry Networks, Extreme Networks and others have madestrides in the market, despite serious competition from Cisco, NortelNetworks, Lucent Technologies and others.
Mehrotra declined to state what Procket is building and when the companywill go public with its product plans.
While Procket has remained quiet, sources believe the two-year-old start-uphas good potential because they believe the company is building newhigh-speed routers, which telecommunications service provides use in theirnetworks to handle the explosion of Net traffic. Routers send Internettraffic over a network at high speeds.
Cisco and Juniper are the two dominant players in thefast-growing high-end router market, which is expected to reach $2.1billion in sales this year and $12 billion by 2003, according to marketresearch company RHK.