CEO keeps an eye on the caching ball - CacheFlow CEO Brian NeSmith - Company Business and Marketing

Communications News,  July, 2001  by Sean Kelly

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Brian NeSmith coaches CacheFlow on a changing field.

Caching and content delivery are entering a whole new ball game. Standalone caching appliances are making way for more complex relationships to address the needs of streaming content. Caching pioneer CacheFlow and its youthful CEO, Brian NeSmith, are positioned in the leadoff spot as this industry matures and expands.

By the time NeSmith was named CEO of CacheFlow in March 1999--at the age of 36--he already had made several major marks on the information technology industry. With the Sunny-vale, CA-based company positioned to lead the content-delivery infrastructure field, NeSmith says the key to success is keeping his eye on the ball.

"As the old coaches say, `Baseball's a simple game. You catch the ball, you throw the ball, you hit the ball,'" he explains, comparing the nation's pastime with his marketing philosophy. His game plan: "You listen to the customers, you listen to your engineers, you build the products that they're interested in, you sell them and you take care of the customer. In this economy--and the way the Internet has changed things--people forget that. We're going to stay focused in those areas. It's just fundamental execution."

NESmith notes a change in the caching industry lineup with the development of streaming content. "The market itself has undergone a very profound change in the last year." he observes. "One year ago, people used caches on a box-by-box basis, to improve response time or reduce balance consumption. It was a very straightforward proposition. There was no relation from one cache appliance to another.

"Over the last year, however, the number of content types changed quite dramatically. When a year ago it was all about just standard `HTTP,' today you see streaming content, you see rich multimedia content--more variety in the type and flavors of content." From the caching standpoint, that has made for a much more complex environment.

ERRORS MORE SIGNIFICANT

"A year ago, if you didn't have a piece of content on your appliance, it was not a big deal: you go back to the source server and get it--that was called a miss," he notes. "Now, a miss with a streaming file is a much more significant situation: that user takes a long time to download that file, the first-user's experience is very poor, and he may not even want to complete that experience."

The new types of content require delivery and management networks, NeSmith says. "That's ultimately the way our company has evolved, as well," he points out. "The market has evolved from being about box-level caching appliances to network-wide content delivery solutions--and our company has evolved to fit this market change."

The new environment, says NeSmith, gives CacheFlow another opportunity to lead the field. The latest cleanup hitter: a new content delivery architecture called cIQ, which manages and distributes static, streaming, secure and dynamic content. "cIQ ties in our caching appliances with network and content management platforms to build this network. It is an extension of our original caching appliances."

CacheFlow, founded by Michael Malcolm in 1996, broke into the technology majors that year by developing appliances that accelerate and manage the flow of information over the Internet through a process called caching--the storing of frequently requested objects closer to users asking for them. Caching cuts down on latency, bandwidth consumption and server load, important elements for the increasing number of enterprises migrating toward the Web to boost their bottom line.

Its products were designed as integrated appliances, specialized hardware platforms coupled tightly with its CacheOS operating system. A string of heavy-hitting products followed. The lineup now includes optimized edge and server accelerators, network-based content management and distribution devices, streaming services, filtering extensions, and SSL encryption and acceleration technology--rounded out by the newest products, including cIQ Director, cIQ Edge Accelerator, cIQ Server Accelerator and the recently released cIQ Starter Kit.

ON THE FAST TRACK

Sticking to fundamentals has helped NeSmith coach CacheFlow to rapid growth during his tenure. Net sales rose from $29.2 million in FY 2000 to $97.7 million in FY 2001. "In calendar year 2000, we grew about 300%," NeSmith notes, adding that the company's workforce grew by 200 to 500 in the last year. In January, CacheFlow completed its purchase of Fremont, CA-based Entera--which develops standards-based streaming content distribution and management technologies--for $170 million in stock.

At 38, NeSmith has played at least a part in several corporate teams becoming major players. After several years at Kanata, Canada-based Newbridge Networks' local area network unit--during which revenues grew from $10 million to $1 billion--the Denver-born NeSmith migrated to Silicon Valley in 1995 to become CEO of Ipsilon Networks, an industry pioneer of the Internet protocol switch. Ipsilon's switch is the foundation of all Layer 4+ switching products used today.