Friday, July 11, 2008

Sonus, Juniper alumni team up on IP video startup

By Efrain Viscarolasaga

Longtime networking entrepreneur Jim Dolce has teamed with a syndicate of executives from Sonus Networks Inc. and his former employer, Juniper Networks Inc., to attack the challenges surrounding the delivery of Internet protocol video over both the Internet and operator networks.

Exactly how the company, dubbed Verivue Inc. and officially incorporated last year, will do that remains to be announced. While Dolce confirmed the formation of the company, as well as a $25 million round of funding it landed last April, he would not discuss the company’s technology at length.

The product is expected to be ready near the end of 2008 or in early 2009, according to Dolce. Verivue’s target market will include communications carriers, cable operators and television broadcasters.
“The one thing they all have in common is that they are working to deal with an explosion in video and IP-delivered media,” he said.

Dolce points to a report released by Cisco Systems Inc. last month to highlight the problem Verivue aims to solve. According to the report, by 2012 Internet video traffic alone will be 400 times what it was in 2000, and video on demand, IPTV, peer-to-peer (P2P) video and Internet video are forecast to account for nearly 90 percent of all consumer IP traffic by the same year.

That, said Dolce, is a challenge every carrier and service provider needs to face.

Though quiet, Verivue has grown to about 80 people so far, according to Dolce, most at the company’s Westford headquarters.

Members of the eight-person founding team are no strangers to growing new ventures. Dolce, most recently an executive vice president at Juniper, reached that position after co-founding Westford-based Redstone Communications Inc., which was acquired by neighbor Unisphere Networks Inc. in 2000.  Two years later, in 2002, California-based Juniper acquired Unisphere.

Other founding members of Verivue include Sonus co-founders former chairman Rubin Gruber and former CTO Mike Hluchyj, as well as former Juniper VP of IP Edge and Service Management Christopher Lawler.

Dolce also co-founded Arris Networks Inc., based in Westford, which was sold to Cascade Communications Inc. in 1996.

Investors in the company include Boston-based Spark Capital and Waltham-based Matrix Partners, which was an original investor in Dolce’s Redstone Communications. Board members include Paul Ferri, a co-founder of Matrix partners, and Todd Dagres, a co-founder of Spark Capital.

The “stealth mode company working on video technology” theme has been seen several times over the past couple of years, including the launch of Acton-based PeerMeta Inc. (now called Azuki Systems Inc.), which makes a mobile media distribution platform for wireless handsets, and Andover’s Veveo Inc., which turned out to be a mobile video search product.