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By Carolyn Duffy Marsan 04/23/01
You can sum up Asera's
appeal in a name: Vinod Khosla. The uber-venture capitalist founded the
company and drives its strategy, attracting a superstar lineup of directors and reeling in big-name corporate customers.
Network industry big shots on Asera's board
include former Oracle President Ray Lane, Cisco CIO Peter Solvik, FedEx CIO
Robert Carter and Janpieter Scheerder, president of network storage at
Sun.
Asera's focus is helping manufacturers interact
with distributors, resellers and direct customers over the Web. It claims it
can get companies marketing, selling and supporting their products over the Web
in just 90 days. The company offers its software both as a managed service and
through licenses. Its third-party and homegrown code is modeled after
Cisco's and Dell's e-commerce systems. With its e-business software
shipping for 20 months, Asera has signed up customers such as Cadence Design
Systems, Extreme Networks and Wyse Technology.
The environment at Asera is fast-paced and intense for
its 375 employees. Conference rooms are named after the word for speed in
different languages, such as the German “geschwindigkeit.” Indeed,
the company's software engineers work so frenetically that Asera has
reserved a wing of a nearby hotel to accommodate them.
Asera The name: |
Derived from the Latin root
“acer,” which means keen and eager. Asera interpreted the
word to mean quick and adopted the theme of speed. Founders originally named
the company Acera, but changed the spelling to avoid confusion with Acer, the
Taiwanese PC manufacturer.
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