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By Deni Connor  An
advocate of wireless technology, 56-year-old Canion is investing in
companies that speed content to users, such as MessageASAP and Surgient.
He's also put his money down on a diverse set of companies such as
Questia Media and Tricord Systems. Questia is an online research service
that will give students access to over 50,000 books. At Tricord, Canion
served as co-CEO until shortly before the company introduced its first
server and storage appliances.
In 1981, after Sevin Rosen Funds rejected funding a plug-in disk drive
for the IBM PC, Canion and cohorts Bill Mutro and Jim Harris met with
a designer at the House of Pies. It was there that the designer sketched
a portable PC on a dinner napkin. That sketch would be the origin
of Compaq, a company Sevin Rosen and other investors funded with $1.5
million - back then a big investment.
Ask him how he would have handled the mergers of Tandem and Digital
with Compaq, and he suggests a different scenario. "If Compaq had
actually merged with Gateway, as was rumored in the press, you'd have
seen a much stronger industry leader," he says. "The combination of
Gateway's direct capability and Compaq's business brand would have
allowed Compaq to more successfully compete with Dell and stunted
a lot of its growth."
David House
Former Bay Networks CEO David House, who lives on the edge by helicopter
skiing and racing fast cars, is now focusing on the edge of carrier
networks as the leader of newcomer Allegro Networks.
House says the San Jose start-up is readying products aimed at helping
carriers break through the latest "network choke-point" so they can
deliver broadband services over wider geographic areas. The company
is trying to exploit the shift from circuit to packet switching in
carrier networks, which House says is the most important network change
over the past 15 years.
"The tremendous advances the industry has made in optical technology,
in the number of bits we can put down an optical fiber, is doubling
every eight months, far beyond what Moore's Law provided in semiconductors,"
House says. "The long-distance business is rapidly becoming a zero-margin
business. That has created an unbelievable capacity in trunking and
put all the pressure on the edge of the network."
Before joining Bay, House enjoyed a 14-year career at Intel, where
he transformed the advertising slogan Intel used in Japan, "Intel
In It," to "Intel Inside" and spurred Intel's most successful marketing
campaign. He also oversaw Intel's server group.
"I moved from Intel to Bay Networks when I saw that the limiting factor
in the use of the computer network was not the speed of the processor
but the performance of the network," says House, who spends time out
of the office working with the Computer History Museum in Mountain
View and with disadvantaged kids at the Palo Alto Boys and Girls Center.
"The choke-point was there."
Bud Huber
Former Hughes Aircraft network planner Bud Huber has been collecting
evidence of one kind or another for years.
Today, you might find him photographing evidence for insurance companies,
lawyers and police organizations - an activity he undertakes as a
sideline to his job at IT consulting firm Computer Sciences Corp.
(CSC).
In the past, Hughes made it his business to collect evidence on behalf
of enterprise net managers that could be used to get network product
and service vendors more in line with customer needs.
Huber was among the most visible enterprise network advocates of the
1980s and 1990s, serving as the founding chairman of both the Enterprise
Networking Roundtable and the User Alliance for Open Systems, a group
that later became the voice of customers within the ATM Forum.
Huber says that although ATM never reached its potential in enterprise
networks because of its complexity, he doesn't consider the technology
a failure.
"Technologies such as ATM, wireless or ISDN haven't been failures,"
he says. "It's been a failure of the internetworking [product and
service companies] to achieve elegant simplicity in implementing them."
He points to the Ethernet connector and the URL as the most significant
networking technologies of the past 15 years because they were easy
to implement and use.
Huber retired from Hughes in 1999, thought he might settle down in
Fort Worth, Texas, but then joined IT consulting firm CSC. He describes
himself as CSC's "chief parachutist" - as a member of the company's
executive staff he travels to customer locations, and jumps in to
evaluate and solve their IT problems.
Ray Noorda
Ray Noorda rescued Novell back in 1982, when he joined the then-struggling
network hardware and software company and helped turn it into the
dominant player in the network operating system market.
In leading Novell until he retired in 1994, Noorda fought the good
fight vs. Microsoft, which stumbled more than once in the NOS business
before eventually leapfrogging Novell in market share a few years
back. Noorda fought Microsoft on several other fronts, too, including
the desktop software market, where Novell attempted to compete with
Microsoft through its acquisitions of WordPerfect, Borland's QuattroPro
spreadsheet and Digital Research's DR-DOS.
Not all Noorda's moves worked, for sure. But that hasn't stopped the
man who is still Novell's largest individual shareholder from battling
Microsoft to this day. The press-shy Noorda, who declined to be interviewed
for this article, now oversees The Canopy Group, which was originally
formed to invest in things that Noorda thought Novell should be doing.
Canopy Group dropped its Novell focus in 1996 and now concentrates
on open source and network infrastructure offerings. Canopy, a venture
fund valued at between $1 billion and $2 billion, invests in companies
such as Caldera, Intl., Lineo and Linux Networx, all of which offer
Linux products designed to give companies a choice beyond Windows.
"Anything that would be viewed as a monopoly or controlling the industry,
Ray does a pretty good job of creating something to cause some pain
for that entity," says Ralph Yarro, CEO of Canopy Group, which is
part of the larger Noorda Family Trust. That trust also includes cash
holdings in a string of car dealerships valued at $50 million, investments
in a couple of network storage companies and funding for several charitable
groups.
According to those who work with the peripatetic 76-year-old Noorda,
he still operates in much the same fashion he did while at Novell.
He does a lot of management by walking around and has even arranged
the offices of the companies funded by the Linden, Utah, Canopy Group
in such a fashion that he can walk among them. He also is said to
graciously let anyone make a mistake - as long as they get it right
the second time.
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