The network broker

Communications News, Oct 1, 1998 by Ripley Hotch

Trillium's protocol stacks connect every kind of network - good thing CEO Jeff Lawrence is a nice guy.

Ripley Hotch, Editor

Jeff Lawrence likes complicated stuff. He co-founded Trillium Digital Systems 10 years ago as a consultancy, and over the years has grown it to a $15-million+ company that makes SS7, IP, X.25, ISDN, ATM, frame relay, H.323 and internetworking communications software that can be hooked together into protocol stacks. Trillium's software is used by just about every name vendor in networking: 3Com, Alcatel, Ascend, AT&T, Bay, Cisco, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, Lucent, NEC, Newbridge, Nortel, Qualcomm, Rockwell, Siemens, Toshiba, and Xylan, among others.

In some ways, Trillium looks like the Microsoft of networking. But if you ask Lawrence about it, he just laughs. Customers pay a one-time license fee, and he doesn't plan to change that, unless it's convenient for the customer. That makes his software a bargain.

In fact, he goes to great lengths to be an honest broker in the industry. Obviously, creating the software for all these powerful competitors puts Trillium in the position to know some pretty sensitive information. Lawrence maintains a strict neutrality.

He says, 'We are very proud of the fact that in 10 years in business, we have never had any company say, 'We told you guys what our plans were here, and our competitor found out about it. People are developing lots of new software. A year or two years out we are aware of what is happening, and many people that are developing products are competitive with each other, so we are perceived as neutral in the industry, and we are very consistent about that.'

He's also careful not to use the company's development skills unfairly: 'There have been times when people [ask], 'You provide a moratorium, and if you do this for us first, then you can go and sell it to someone else?' We have walked away from a couple of deals where people asked us to do this. It's great economics from a short-term perspective, but it just isn't true to our direction, our philosophy, and we say, 'Sorry, can't do it.' '

That doesn't mean, however, that Lawrence won't share his insight into the direction of networking - he's a frequent speaker at conferences and trade shows, and cheerfully sits down for an hour to explain the Intelligent Network to a data-oriented network manager. Given where Trillium is situated, he's one of the few technologists who is firmly rooted in all the aspects of the converging network technologies.

'Trillium is at the crossroads,' says Chris Nicoll, senior analyst for Current Analysis, an on-line analytical firm. 'They're well positioned for vendors trying to move into new markets and technologies. The data guys need to acquire a sophisticated protocol suite that absolutely has to be certified (by Bellcore) so you have to buy it. Trillium has a full protocol suite to fit where the data guys don't have it. Conversely, you've got all the circuit switch guys who have to move to IP and they need to pick up the other half of the protocol stack.'

Lawrence got where he is by curiosity and a love of solving complicated problems that led him to look at protocols earlier than almost anyone else.

He graduated from UCLA in 1979 with a degree in electrical engineering, eventually going to work for the communications division of Amdahl.

'I had not studied communications at all, but it was an interesting job,' he says. From writing microcode, he went on to work in various parts of the packet switching group, including product planning. 'At the time AT&T was being broken up and they were buying a lot of our packet switches for internal networks of 10,000 or 20,000 users.'

While at Amdahl he met and worked with Larisa Chistyakov, founding partner and now chief technology officer of Trillium.

They both went to Doelz Networks to put together some LAN/WAN products with X.25 capabilities. The company had financial problems and laid the two engineers off. That was in early 1988, and that's when Trillium was born.

'I had always wanted to try to start a company, and Larisa and I had talked a lot about the opportunity,' Lawrence says. He thinks getting laid off was the best thing that could have happened.

'It's ironic that at that time my wife was working for an aerospace company, and we talked about Trillium and what that would mean for our lives,' he says. New companies are always chancy, and both of them thought her job was for life. 'Well, she got laid off in the first aerospace crunch and Trillium is still in business.'

Meanwhile, Chistyakov had been working on portable software with another company, eventually joining Lawrence in Trillium after six months. That was when they decided to create some products.

'We bought a 286 PC and a couple of folding tables and opened a little office in West Los Angeles.' They created the fundamental architecture of the product line, called TAPA (Trillium Advanced Portability Architecture). The first real product was for X.25. Customers showed up. Then the two heard about ISDN, and, says Lawrence, 'We needed to teach ourselves what ISDN was. We did. Then we went and developed ISDN software.'