Finding The “Holy Grail” Of Networking - The Wall Street Journal

There are two words hideously over-used in the tech start-up world: “revolutionary” and “disruptive”. However, it is hard to think of other words to use about Intune Networks, an Irish high-tech start up that has technology that could catapult fibre efficiency from a few per cent up to the mid 80s.

I spoke to their CEO, Tim Friztley, in Dublin. Mr. Friztley is a grey-beard veteran of many years in the networking world including GTE, Tellabs, and most recently VP of Global Sales and Solutions at Microsoft TV. What decades of experience gives Mr. Friztley is the insight to know when a true-game changer has come along.

“I had a friend doing some work for me in Dublin and one day he gives me a call. He said ‘Look here Tim, these two PhD guys, John Dunne and Tom Farrell, these guys have invented an optical burst packet switch. And I broke out laughing. ‘If someone had invented that I would know about it by now’.

“This has been the holy grail of networking. The biggest labs in the world have been working on this problem. So I kind of scoffed at the fact that two kids in Dublin had a working optical burst packet switch.”

To cut a long story short: eight years and €49 million in funding later, that is exactly what they have done.

Shifting intelligence to the edge

The problem with networks today is that intelligence is at the centre, not the edge. So if you send an email from your address to your neighbour, the data is brought into the centre where it is sorted and then sent out again. It is a bit like sending a postcard from Cork airport to University College, Cork, and having it go via Dublin.

This is slow and it means local fibre loops have very little traffic flowing over them, while the central hubs are stuffed up.

“The best utilisation they [operators] get from their switches and fibre is 20%. Most cases its 5%, in many it is less than 1%,” says Mr. Friztley.

That means all that digging up the road, and all that expensive switching gear is sitting around doing practically nothing.

No sending data to the centre

How does Intune solve the problem? Put the smarts out on the edge. The heart of Intune’s system is a tuneable laser that can switch between one of 160 colours in nanoseconds.

Imagine a fibre loop with a series of nodes. Each node is assigned a colour and each is listening out for its colour. Along comes a packet. The system looks at the packet’s destination — let’s say it maps to the blue node — so the laser switches to blue and fires out the data. The next packet arrives nanoseconds later, it maps to the green node, the laser switches in nanoseconds and fires out that data. And so on.

In the loop, the nodes can pass on data on every other colour, but will “pluck out” the data on their own colour. So in our example above, the blue node picks up the data aimed at it, and delivers it, but simply passes through untouched the next packet on green, which the green node picks up and delivers.

This way data can be delivered locally without having to haul it all the way back to the centre, just to be sent back to edge, dramatically improving latency and the utilisation of the existing fibre.

Works with any tuneable laser

The secret sauce, that Mr. Dunne and Mr. Farrell discovered, was how to turn any available tuneable laser into an optical burst switch. Lasers are based on crystals. Apply a tiny charge and you get a laser. But each crystal is unique so each behaves very slightly differently. What everyone else had been trying to do was to grow new types of crystals. What Mr. Dunne and Mr. Farrell did was work with the existing tuneable laser companies to develop a new control system for nanosecond control of these tuneable laser being developed by many companies.

“What John and Tom figured out was that they could characterise that laser by imaging it through digital signal processing. Based upon that image they could develop a control algorithm and guarantee that that signal would hop to the centre of that colour every time over a 15 year life cycle,” said Mr. Friztley.

Intune is currently in trials at the moment with a major U.S. carrier, but Mr. Friztley was confident the system would easily meet their requirements and is on track to ship in Q1 of 2011.

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Intune targets IPO to be Ireland's anchor tech firm - Irish Times

One of Ireland’s hottest visual content delivery start-ups reveals its exit strategy. IAN CAMPBELL reports

INTUNE NETWORKS will be sold or go for an initial public offering (IPO) within three years, according to company chief executive Tim Fritzley.

He outlined his plan as the firm prepares to enter the commercial marketplace following what Fritzley describes as “one of the world’s most complex telecom development projects”.

Coming from the US with a CV that includes a stint heading up Microsoft’s internet protocol television (IPTV) business, Fritzley is well-acquainted with telecoms providers and is bullish enough to namecheck potential buyers.

“Cisco buys mature technologies so that is one exit strategy. But Ericsson, Alcatel, and all the other companies need to refresh their portfolios. They are about five to six years away from next-generation technology and need to buy it.”

Back in 2006, when Fritzley first pitched venture capitalists to fund Intune, he told them the telecoms industry was cyclical and they would see a healthy return on their investment.

“That was the bet I made. I told them at a point in time, when the pendulum swings back, we’ll have a product ready to go and somebody will buy us.”

He said the company mindset is focused on an IPO in 2012 or 2013, but investors may favour a sale if the right offer comes along.

“From a personal standpoint, the executives and founders would like to see an IPO. Ireland doesn’t have an anchor technology company and InTune could be it.”

Founded in 1999 by two UCD graduates, John Dunne and Tom Farrell, Intune Networks has developed advanced optical networking products that give carriers and internet service providers the capacity to meet growing demands for bandwidth. An explosion in video content and emerging models for cloud-based services have put a strain on networks that is only likely to get worse.

Bottlenecks will be alleviated by what Fritzley calls the “holy grail of networking”. For 30 years, laboratories and universities had identified optical packet switching technology as the way forward but it took Dunne and Farrell to come up with a clever piece of IP that made it commercial and scalable.

In 2006, Fritzley joined as chief executive and calculated that the company would need five years and €70 million to commercialise its products. Early investors were found in Britain and the US, as their Irish counterparts opted for property over technology.

“A well-known Irish investor laughed at me,” recalls Fritzley. “He said he could go across the street and buy a €5 million lot and turn it around for €30 million the next week.”

Enterprise Ireland and Invest Northern Ireland did come on board.

An R&D division run out of Belfast has been crucial in bringing the products to market, drawing on 20 years of telecoms experience in the region. Nortel and then Flextronics had built up an RD capability, some of which has now passed to InTune. Just as well, because Fritzley was close to going to the US for the skills after being unable to find what he needed in the South.

“Eighteen months ago, we wanted to move forward with the commercialisation, which is incredibly expensive and complex because big carriers have very specific requirements. In Dublin, there isn’t a culture of developing this type of equipment, but we found it in Belfast,” he said.

The upshot is that Intune now promotes itself to the world as an all-Ireland company. In the South, its ties go even deeper with the Government having invested €10 million in funding the build of the Exemplar Network using Intune technology.

“In September 2008, they came to me and asked how they could keep the technology in Ireland and build an ecosystem around it,” said Fritzley. “They came up with the idea of an open facility that could generate jobs and inward investment into Ireland around next-generation network technology.”

More than 30 companies and institutions have signed up to use the testbed, including BT, Imagine, EMC, UCC Tyndall, NUI Galway, UCD and DCU.

If Intune sells up, investors may get a good return but what happens to the Government’s ambitions to create a core competency? Fritzley says that if there is a solid technology core that employs 200-250 people, a company like Cisco would leave it where it was. InTune currently employs about 135 people but expects to grow further.

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“POTN will solve challenge of growing traffic on networks” – Intune Networks

INTUNE NETWORKS FOUNDER ADDRESSES PACKET-OPTICAL TRANSPORT NETWORKING EVENT


Berlin, 18 November 2010 – John Dunne, Founder and CTO of Intune Networks, led an expert panel discussion this week at the Packet-Optical Transport Networking Event held in Berlin, Germany. In his session, John outlined the potential for Packet-Optical Transport Networking to solve the issues facing network operators as they cope with growing traffic demand and look for ways to bridge the gap between today’s network infrastructure and tomorrow’s business needs.

John discussed how the challenge facing network operators is in finding ways to evolve their network architectures to cope with the massive increase in unpredictable traffic demand while sustaining profitability and controlling costs. Intune Networks offers operators an innovative approach to solving this problem through its breakthrough technology named Optical Packet Switch and Transport.

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