Intune Networks, an Irish firm that has claimed to have solved issues of internet speed and quality, plans to hire 80 people and raise up to €10 million in funding in 2010.
The company has 120 staff in Dublin and Belfast, and is preparing to launch its product, a highly-technical internet switch built using laser technologies.
Tim Fritzley, chief executive of Intune, said that the firm was bullish about the future after solving a problem that other companies had spent decades and ‘‘upwards of $1 billion’’ trying to resolve.
He said he expected Intune to ultimately employ ‘‘several thousand’’ people and have revenues running to hundreds of millions of euro a year.
Late last year, the firm raised €22 million from investors led by Dermot Desmond and Kernel Capital. Three international funders invested almost €13 million in Intune in 2007.
Fritzley said that 2010 was ‘‘off to a very fast start’’ for the company, which was founded ten years ago.
‘‘I am very hopeful for a banner year for our product launch and first adopters [of the product]. I think the timing is very good for the commercial release," he said.
Intune will face competition from big firms such as Cisco and Alcatel-Lucent, but Fritzley claimed that the Irish company’s product was cheaper and better than competing products. He said that Intune could be built towards a stock market listing.
‘‘We will start to make decisions about which path to follow later this year, or early in 2011," he said.
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Monday, January 11, 2010
Calling the Tune - Sunday Business Post
After a hectic 2009,Tim Fritzley took a break over Christmas to return to his native Idaho and catch his breath in the Rocky Mountains.
It’s not surprising he needed a breather - in the past 12 months, he has overseen big advances at Intune Networks, a Dublin-based firm which has developed technology that it claims will revolutionise the speed and quality of the internet.
Last year, Intune expanded to 120 staff, secured €22 million in funding, got a big endorsement from the government and successfully staged the first public demonstration of its technology - in conjunction with rockers Snow Patrol.
But if that sounds like a lot of work for one year, Fritzley is expecting more of the same in 2010.He plans to hire another 80 staff, raise up to €10 million more funding, launch Intune’s product globally and strike multimillion euro deals with major telecoms companies. As Fritzley puts it: ‘‘It’s kind of insane."
That’s because he is trying to do something no one has done before - build an Irish technology firm with annual revenues of hundreds of millions of euro and thousands of staff. For lay people, he says that Intune is ‘‘building a new internet switch using optics’’, but that description hides the deep complexity of the company’s technology.
At its most basic, the Intune system uses different coloured lasers to carry data over existing fibre-optic networks in amore efficient way.
That means that telecoms firms that buy Intune’s switch will be able to offer more - and better quality - internet services to customers, giving them an advantage over competitors using older technology.
The demonstration of the Intune technology - when a concert by Snow Patrol in Dingle last month was broadcast to viewers in a local hotel over fibre - showed the high quality picture and sound that Fritzley claims will revolutionise the telecoms world.
‘‘Intune has solved a problem that researchers have been working on for 20 or 25 years, one that upwards of $1 billion has gone into trying to solve," he said.
He firmly believes that the company can ‘‘get over the hump’’ that foiled other Irish firms and become a global firm to rival the likes of Cisco and Ericsson.
Founded in 1999 by John Dunne and Tom Farrell, Intune did early work in tuneable lasers, winning contracts with organisations such as the European Space Agency. But after Dunne and Farrell developed so-called ‘optical burst switching’ technology using lasers, the company refocused its attention on the lucrative communications sector.
In August 2006, Fritzley was lured from a comfortable job running Microsoft TV in America, and moved to Dublin to become chief executive of Intune.
The firm, which had 12 staff at the time, has been on ‘‘a voyage of discovery’’ since then. Heading into 2010, ‘‘the science is over’’ and the company is preparing to ramp up its sales and marketing effort.
‘‘We’re in the chute now and at a point where we can predict an outcome.
Lots of companies don’t get into that chute," said Fritzley.
He expects Intune to record its first revenues this year, and to increase them exponentially from there. With each Intune switch expected to sell for about €300,000 and hundreds of thousands of switches in demand by telecoms operators annually, Fritzley is forecasting revenues of ‘‘hundreds of millions’’ per customer.
He is confident Intune can win business from global companies such as Cisco, claiming the Irish firm’s technology is better and cheaper.’ ‘We are continually scanning the horizon for competition and we believe we’re in a good position," he said.
Some heavyweight figures share Fritzley’s enthusiasm and belief, with the company attracting experienced investors since its inception. Its backers from the early years include ICC Venture Capital (now part of Bank of Scotland (Ireland)), Enterprise Ireland and technology sector figures including Leonard Donnelly and Bernie Dillon.
It was Donnelly who introduced Fritzley to Intune and, ultimately, convinced him to swap his Microsoft job for the small Irish company.
A year after he became chief executive, Intune took a big step forward, raising almost €13 million in investment from Amadeus Capital Partners, Balderton Capital and Spark Capital.
By late 2008, the company had met the obligations attached to the funding, with an expansion in staff and a prototype product in tests with three ‘‘very large European carriers’’, according to Fritzley. He can’t name the companies for reasons of commercial sensitivity, but said that ‘‘the feedback was really positive’’, giving grounds for optimism.
The plan was to raise follow-on funding of about €30 million, to take it to full commercialisation and launch globally. But in difficult economic conditions, the fundraising took longer than expected and the firm had to cut its cloth.
‘‘We went into cash conservation mode," said Fritzley, whose goal was to keep his highly-specialised team together.’ ‘Rather than lay off 15 or 20 per cent of our staff, we had huge salary cuts of up to 35 per cent."
He held on to his 120 staff in Dublin and Belfast, which include 40 with PhDs or Master’s qualifications. T he remainder all had degrees, said Fritzley, who claims to have ‘‘the largest optical networking R&D team in the world’’.
Reflecting the heavy cost of staffing and building its technology, Intune’s 2008 accounts show a loss of €9.5 million that year, bringing accumulated losses to almost €25 million.
T hen, in October last year, it announced the completion of the funding round, with €22 million coming from financier Dermot Desmond, Kernel Capital in Cork, and Intune’s existing investors.
Fritzley would not comment on the valuation placed on Intune, but said it was about 30 per cent lower than the valuation following the previous funding round, reflecting tougher economic conditions.’ ‘Just about anybody can get series A funding, but series B is typically a death round. If you can make it through that, usually you don’t fail," he said.
He said he was pleased with the quality of the firm’s backers, describing Desmond as ‘‘a value investor who stays with his companies’’. The investors now own about 70 per cent of Intune, with the remainder held by founders, management and employees.
Fritzley said the firm intended to raise between €5 million and €10 million more this year to expand the company and get to a cashflow positive position.’ ‘We are looking at our next phase of hiring and will take a serious run at building the sales team. By mid-2010,we should be closing in on 200 people and the new funding, as well as our first commercial revenues," he said.
It will also make progress on a government-backed project to introduce its technology in Ireland.
Under the so-called Exemplar Network project, Intune will build and trial a controlled network using its switches, and then apply the technology to existing fibre networks, bringing its benefits to Irish businesses and universities.
Fritzley described the Exemplar project as ‘‘a very minor investment for big returns for Ireland’’, and believes it will make this country more attractive for business investment.
In the longer term, he sees Intune employing ‘‘several thousand people’’ who will work in technical development and product support and maintenance for customers around the world.
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It’s not surprising he needed a breather - in the past 12 months, he has overseen big advances at Intune Networks, a Dublin-based firm which has developed technology that it claims will revolutionise the speed and quality of the internet.
Last year, Intune expanded to 120 staff, secured €22 million in funding, got a big endorsement from the government and successfully staged the first public demonstration of its technology - in conjunction with rockers Snow Patrol.
But if that sounds like a lot of work for one year, Fritzley is expecting more of the same in 2010.He plans to hire another 80 staff, raise up to €10 million more funding, launch Intune’s product globally and strike multimillion euro deals with major telecoms companies. As Fritzley puts it: ‘‘It’s kind of insane."
That’s because he is trying to do something no one has done before - build an Irish technology firm with annual revenues of hundreds of millions of euro and thousands of staff. For lay people, he says that Intune is ‘‘building a new internet switch using optics’’, but that description hides the deep complexity of the company’s technology.
At its most basic, the Intune system uses different coloured lasers to carry data over existing fibre-optic networks in amore efficient way.
That means that telecoms firms that buy Intune’s switch will be able to offer more - and better quality - internet services to customers, giving them an advantage over competitors using older technology.
The demonstration of the Intune technology - when a concert by Snow Patrol in Dingle last month was broadcast to viewers in a local hotel over fibre - showed the high quality picture and sound that Fritzley claims will revolutionise the telecoms world.
‘‘Intune has solved a problem that researchers have been working on for 20 or 25 years, one that upwards of $1 billion has gone into trying to solve," he said.
He firmly believes that the company can ‘‘get over the hump’’ that foiled other Irish firms and become a global firm to rival the likes of Cisco and Ericsson.
Founded in 1999 by John Dunne and Tom Farrell, Intune did early work in tuneable lasers, winning contracts with organisations such as the European Space Agency. But after Dunne and Farrell developed so-called ‘optical burst switching’ technology using lasers, the company refocused its attention on the lucrative communications sector.
In August 2006, Fritzley was lured from a comfortable job running Microsoft TV in America, and moved to Dublin to become chief executive of Intune.
The firm, which had 12 staff at the time, has been on ‘‘a voyage of discovery’’ since then. Heading into 2010, ‘‘the science is over’’ and the company is preparing to ramp up its sales and marketing effort.
‘‘We’re in the chute now and at a point where we can predict an outcome.
Lots of companies don’t get into that chute," said Fritzley.
He expects Intune to record its first revenues this year, and to increase them exponentially from there. With each Intune switch expected to sell for about €300,000 and hundreds of thousands of switches in demand by telecoms operators annually, Fritzley is forecasting revenues of ‘‘hundreds of millions’’ per customer.
He is confident Intune can win business from global companies such as Cisco, claiming the Irish firm’s technology is better and cheaper.’ ‘We are continually scanning the horizon for competition and we believe we’re in a good position," he said.
Some heavyweight figures share Fritzley’s enthusiasm and belief, with the company attracting experienced investors since its inception. Its backers from the early years include ICC Venture Capital (now part of Bank of Scotland (Ireland)), Enterprise Ireland and technology sector figures including Leonard Donnelly and Bernie Dillon.
It was Donnelly who introduced Fritzley to Intune and, ultimately, convinced him to swap his Microsoft job for the small Irish company.
A year after he became chief executive, Intune took a big step forward, raising almost €13 million in investment from Amadeus Capital Partners, Balderton Capital and Spark Capital.
By late 2008, the company had met the obligations attached to the funding, with an expansion in staff and a prototype product in tests with three ‘‘very large European carriers’’, according to Fritzley. He can’t name the companies for reasons of commercial sensitivity, but said that ‘‘the feedback was really positive’’, giving grounds for optimism.
The plan was to raise follow-on funding of about €30 million, to take it to full commercialisation and launch globally. But in difficult economic conditions, the fundraising took longer than expected and the firm had to cut its cloth.
‘‘We went into cash conservation mode," said Fritzley, whose goal was to keep his highly-specialised team together.’ ‘Rather than lay off 15 or 20 per cent of our staff, we had huge salary cuts of up to 35 per cent."
He held on to his 120 staff in Dublin and Belfast, which include 40 with PhDs or Master’s qualifications. T he remainder all had degrees, said Fritzley, who claims to have ‘‘the largest optical networking R&D team in the world’’.
Reflecting the heavy cost of staffing and building its technology, Intune’s 2008 accounts show a loss of €9.5 million that year, bringing accumulated losses to almost €25 million.
T hen, in October last year, it announced the completion of the funding round, with €22 million coming from financier Dermot Desmond, Kernel Capital in Cork, and Intune’s existing investors.
Fritzley would not comment on the valuation placed on Intune, but said it was about 30 per cent lower than the valuation following the previous funding round, reflecting tougher economic conditions.’ ‘Just about anybody can get series A funding, but series B is typically a death round. If you can make it through that, usually you don’t fail," he said.
He said he was pleased with the quality of the firm’s backers, describing Desmond as ‘‘a value investor who stays with his companies’’. The investors now own about 70 per cent of Intune, with the remainder held by founders, management and employees.
Fritzley said the firm intended to raise between €5 million and €10 million more this year to expand the company and get to a cashflow positive position.’ ‘We are looking at our next phase of hiring and will take a serious run at building the sales team. By mid-2010,we should be closing in on 200 people and the new funding, as well as our first commercial revenues," he said.
It will also make progress on a government-backed project to introduce its technology in Ireland.
Under the so-called Exemplar Network project, Intune will build and trial a controlled network using its switches, and then apply the technology to existing fibre networks, bringing its benefits to Irish businesses and universities.
Fritzley described the Exemplar project as ‘‘a very minor investment for big returns for Ireland’’, and believes it will make this country more attractive for business investment.
In the longer term, he sees Intune employing ‘‘several thousand people’’ who will work in technical development and product support and maintenance for customers around the world.
Read More
Friday, December 11, 2009
Tech firm tuned in to network revolution - The Irish Times
Dublin company Intune Networks is at the forefront of developing technologies that could transform the telecoms industryA WORLD first was achieved in a quiet corner of Co Kerry last week, with the first demonstration of new technology that could revolutionise the telecoms industry. While Northern Irish band Snow Patrol held an intimate show at St James’s Church in the centre of Dingle as part of the Other Voices series, the concert was transmitted to high-definition screens across the road in Benners Hotel using a fibre-optic network.
The technology was formulated by Dublin- based telecoms equipment supplier Intune Networks, which has been tasked with setting up the Exemplar network, a new Government-backed smart network that will be built across the State.
Founded in 1999 by UCD graduates John Dunne and Tom Farrell, Intune Networks, which is based in Park West in Dublin, has developed a potential way of solving one of the biggest problems facing the development of next-generation fibre-optic communications networks: inefficient use of capacity.
The company, which recently closed a €22 million funding round, counts financier Dermot Desmond and venture-capital firm Kernel Capital among its investors.
It has developed a technology known as optical packet switch and transport (OPST). Current fibre-optic networks are underutilised, employing only a fraction of the capacity available because they send data as a single colour of light. Using OPST allows more traffic to be sent over existing fibre-optic networks using different coloured lights.
The live, high-definition transmission of the concert was used to demonstrate the company’s latest technology, a distributed telecoms switch based on optical burst switching. Using this equipment, providers could ensure mass, live, simultaneous content downloads with a guaranteed level of quality.
Users could also connect to local WiFi hotspots with a laptop or mobile device, such as an iPhone, to view the transmission.
It has taken $50 million (€33.9 million) and 10 years of development to come up with the switches that were used to create the local area network in Dingle.
The transmission of the Snow Patrol concert demonstrated how the laser technology could be used to provide simultaneous broadcasts to different areas. “Some of the network arrives in here, and we’re splitting it up and putting it on to the TV screens. Some of the video is going out to the lobby area and the bar where there are four high-def TVs,” says Dunne, speaking in the hotel in Dingle. “You have one laser sending all these signals. What it’s doing is it’s changing colours; it’s bursting one colour to this room, one colour outside, one upstairs. We’re chopping up the video.
“The technology is designed not to drop any packets [units of data]. This is one of the key inventions that the company came up with. Normally, when you send a packet over the internet, if it doesn’t arrive for some reason, a signal sends instructions to send it again.
“With our system, the packet can be chopped up, so if you only manage to send half the packet, it still gets across the network. Then you send the rest of the packet on the next available slot or burst. By creating an asynchronous access to all the bandwidth on the system, you’re able to do quality of experience.”
While the internet has become the global tool of choice for streaming video from remote locations, Intune’s technology vastly improves the possibilities. Current internet infrastructure is inherently unsuitable for such high-quality media broadcasts.
“There is no way the internet could deliver this,” says Dunne. “The internet has an unknown number of switches that your signal would have to go through. Any sort of application that involves live multimedia streaming or interactivity can’t be delivered over the internet. The internet is a fantastic global community, but as a consequence of it being a global community, you have to accept that the quality won’t be there. This is purely a local area network that would work, for example, in the region of Leinster.”
The potential for the technology is vast, opening up opportunities for everyone from local communities to budding TV moguls.
“This network will allow you to set up your own TV station effectively. If you had a gig or a local sports event, you could use the laser to pay for only a small subset of the bandwidth, and it can be monetised. It changes the economics of how this thing works,” says Dunne.
“Because the laser can tune and change, we’ve built a software interface into the network itself. You could go home and in a few minutes set up your own TV station. People could subscribe to it all over Ireland. You could blog over a live high-definition network. It could totally change how communities work because you’ve added video to communities, at the same quality as if you’re sitting next to them in the room.”
The technology can be reprogrammed easily according to the services that are required. It also uses less energy, meaning it has a lower carbon footprint than other internet technologies and fits in with the Government’s strategy for a green economy.
Developing the technology in Ireland will be beneficial to the local economy, with the Exemplar network expected to create up to 5,000 jobs in the future. Intune employs 120 staff in Dublin and Belfast; the development of the Exemplar network is expected to add an extra 350 jobs to the company.
Intune hopes Ireland will become a test bed for the technologies and will be seen as a centre of excellence, putting the State at the forefront of new developments.
The Government is firmly behind the development of the new technology. “Ireland is going to concentrate on a few areas. Optical burst switching is one where we’re leading the world,” says Barry McSweeney, director of the National Knowledge Society Strategy. “The Government intends to invest in this.”
The basic infrastructure for Intune’s technology is already in place, with 400,000 fibre rings installed in cities across Europe and North America. They are costly to install, with fixed systems that are often underutilised.
Dunne predicts that there will be a major shift in the ownership of networks in Ireland in the future. A number of operators exist here, each with their own infrastructure – a situation Dunne believes is unsustainable.
“With our system, many different network operators could use the same infrastructure. Everyone can use the bit of the network they need. What we’ve done is effectively virtualised the use of the infrastructure,” he says.
“The world can’t support all of these vendors. What we’re saying is that one of them will become a virtual operator. They’ll run the physical network and some of the others will just sit on top. They’ll all compete, not on quality, but on the content.”
Dunne predicts that eventually there will be a business model whereby operators compete based on the services they offer, such as cloud computing, or an exclusive entertainment deal they have agreed – a far cry from today’s environment where operators get paid simply for providing internet access.
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