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By
Ann Bednarz Company name: Inspired by a Digital Island customer who sought a full-time person to engineer routes for his company and was advised to find someone "proficient in the art of internetworking." Origin: Founded in February 2001 by four former Digital Island executives and engineers. Funding: $6 million in one round closed in May 2001. Key investors: Canaan Partners, El Dorado Ventures, and private investors Ed Kozel, a former Cisco CTO, and Ron Higgins, former Digital Island CTO. CEO: Co-founder Allan Leinwand, who has been CTO at Telegis Networks and Digital Networks. Product: Network Policy Engine NPE1010A appliance. "Route control" is a buzzword among service providers
and their enterprise customers these days ÷ and Proficient wants
to cash in on it. The concept of route control is simple: to override
Border Gateway Protocol path selection in ISP
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networks
by determining the best path based on factors such as latency and
congestion. Proficient takes things a step further than other route
control vendors by factoring in business objectives. Rather than
simply tuning Internet connections based on performance, Proficient
can distinguish among applications and customers. High-priority
traffic might move across fast, reliable connections, while lower-priority
traffic might travel slower, less-expensive routes. The San Francisco
company accomplishes this through its Network Policy Engine appliance.
Deployed at an enterprise site, the appliance collects network traffic
information, tests network paths and routes traffic accordingly,
distributing loads across diverse provider networks. 
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