Q&A: BreakingPointSystems
Q&A Wednesday proved to be a popular feature. This week our Q&A is with Dennis Cox, Co-Founder and Chief Technical Officer at BreakingPoint Systems. BreakingPoint recently announced the launch of their first product, the BPS-1000, for networking and intrusion testing.
Q: You have created a very technically sophisticated product for the really smart people that maintain and test networks against intrusion. It seems like a daily battle of new viruses, exploits, and other attacks. How does your product make life easier for network engineers?
A: Test products are really complicated. There are half a dozen different boxes to buy along with servers and software to tie it all together just to test one product. This gets very expensive, very quickly. Since all the boxes are different, it takes a tremendous amount of time to get up to speed on how each one of these devices works and correlating the data is near impossible. Today’s test equipment is the definition of a kludge.
We changed all that - we have made it extremely ease to use, one pricing model, one product to run everything, and it’s all included.
On top of that, we boosted the performance to 500x what some of the competitors can do. The three big dogs in the market (IXIA, SPIRENT and AGILENT) have been sitting on their tails for close to 10 years doing nothing to improve the state of their products. It really causes a big impact on the folks working on emerging technology products.
Q: How did the idea for the company come about? Is there a famous cocktail napkin with a drawing that spawned the idea?
A: Craig Cantrell and I would make jokes in the hallway at TippingPoint (before the 3Com purchase) that the test equipment market was really screwed up. We said if we sell this company, we would make test equipment just to fix the issue. That way we wouldn’t have to experience the trouble of test equipment again at the next company. We sold TippingPoint and about 6 months later were thinking what to do next.
We all sat around and were going over ideas of the next big thing we could do when I brought up the idea of making test equipment. Everybody kind of laughed because we had joked about it before; however when we went through the exercise of markets ripe for an overhaul, test equipment stood out head and shoulders above the rest.
Q: Has there been any funding for the company from outside investors, or from the board?
A: There has been some funding from outside (Austin Ventures and a famous bicycle rider), but for the most part, the founders and the board of directors have been funding the company.
Q: The company was founded in Sept 2005 and the BPS-1000 was launched in July of 2007. That is a short period of time in which to develop hardware and software, and launch it to the market. How did you ramp the company so quickly?
A: We did ramp fairly quickly with a hardware solution. In our past companies, we really built up expertise in Network Processor Development and leveraged that heavily at BreakingPoint.
Q: You’ve accomplished a lot in a short period of time. What can we look forward to from BreakingPoint?
A: I believe we changed the way testing is done. Tests took days or weeks to create and run, now they take minutes. The next step is to bring test equipment to the masses. By the masses, in this case, I mean everybody that manages a network.
Filed under: Q&A Wednesday
I had a follow up question for Dennis after this went to press, that I thought I would post here in the comments.
Q: I manage my home network. Does that mean I might be seeing some products from BreakingPoint on the shelf at Best Buy in the future?
A: Depends on the size of your home
As for Best Buy I would doubt you would ever see it there - but CDW is not beyond the realm of possibility.