Departments
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Week of 22 October 1999 |
Vol. III, No. 11 |
Feature
Article
When cyberspace calls
BU fund is midwifeto faculty spin-off
By Hope Green
As the software industry and the Internet spur something akin to a new industrial revolution, many technologically skilled professors are abandoning academia to create hot new start-up firms.
But with seed money and guidance from Boston University's Community Technology Fund (CTF), two members of the CAS computer science faculty have become successful entrepreneurs without having to leave the classroom behind.
Azer Bestavros, CAS associate professor of computer science, and Mark Crovella, assistant professor, worked with CTF's internal new-ventures initiative to cofound Commonwealth Network Technologies, Inc. (CNT) in April 1998. Their efforts quickly came to fruition: in mid-October they sold the company to WebManage Technologies, Inc., of Chelmsford, Mass., for an undisclosed amount of cash and stock.
The arrangement will provide royalties and equity payments to the two professors, the University, CAS, and the computer science department.
"The CTF program is enabling us to pursue our interests without having to give up what we love to do, which is teach," Bestavros says. "It is allowing ideas to be developed that otherwise would not see the light of day."
CNT has developed proprietary software that aims to help companies, organizations, and Internet service providers to inexpensively manage large volumes of online customer traffic. The patent-pending technology, called Distributed Routing, enhances the performance of Web servers, the machines that make Internet information accessible to customers.
Large Internet sites tend to require a cluster of machinery to handle customer queries. The typical hardware setup consists of a special-purpose centralized router that directs each customer to one of several servers. But CNT's software makes each of the servers a router as well. In an arrangement analogous to a telephone switchboard, information can be routed to multiple clients from a multitude of servers simultaneously. So instead of facing a gridlocked intersection at one central point, CNT's founders say, customer traffic flows smoothly, as if around a rotary.
So far, CNT has developed two Distributed Routing products. The first, WebScaler, balances the load of transactions so that no customer is turned away at the door of a heavily used site. The second product, WebCaterer, makes it possible to guarantee different levels of service to online customers according to preset agreements.
"You might want one Web server to be like the first-class section of an airplane, for paying customers," Crovella says. "Other customers might get economy class, and they might not get their data as quickly."
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Azer Bestavros (left), CAS
associate professor of computer science, and Mark
Crovella, assistant professor, are cofounders of
Commonwealth Network Technologies, Inc.
Photo by Fred Sway
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Roger Kitterman, director of new ventures, was president of CNT until it was sold. He and Randall Crawford, the Technology Fund's director of venture capital, both served on the board of directors.
"Here were entrepreneurial professors with ideas and patents," Crawford says. "We had the business and financial expertise. They had the technical knowledge. We assisted in managing the company and helped it achieve its goals."
From the time Bestavros and Crovella approached CTF with their idea in 1997 until incorporating in April 1998, they were in touch with Kitterman almost daily.
"I learned a lot about what it is to start a company," Bestavros says. "Two years ago I had no idea what venture capitalists do, how to write a business plan, or how marketing plays a role. As a faculty member, which is what I love to be, I think I'm a better professor, both in teaching and advising my students, because now I know a lot more about what a start-up is, what it takes to succeed, and the speed at which this industry is progressing."
The CNT success story, says Crovella, will serve as a model to help the expanding CAS computer science department in its recruiting efforts. "Right now with the information technology sector exploding, it's very hard to compete for computer science faculty," he says. "This dilemma that faculty find themselves in is not really about money; it's about letting their ideas have some impact in the wider world.
"But if I have great ideas and can turn them into products that people will be using in their homes in the next five months, that's incredibly exciting to think about."
Commonwealth Network Technologies, Inc. is located on the Web at www.commonwealthnet.com.