SAN MATEO, Calif. — Terabit-router vendor Pluris Inc. (Cupertino, Calif.) shut its doors abruptly this week, ending a five-year attempt to expand the scope of core routers.
Pluris executives did not return calls for comment, and the company's phone lines appear to be unmanned. But a handful of employees gathered in the parking lot Tuesday (July 9) confirmed that the company closed on Monday.
Keeping to the shade to avoid a brutal California heat wave, employees said the shutdown was abrupt and unexpected.
"I got a job offer last week that I turned down, because I thought this company could make it at least three more quarters," one employee said.
All employees were laid off except for a handful of human resources staffers, retained to finish the details of shutting down Pluris, employees said.
The employees said they weren't told why the company closed. Pluris did raise $53 million in venture funding in February, but investors and executives may have decided that the company's chances were too dim, the core-routing market having changed too brutally since Pluris' founding in 1997.
Along with startups such as Avici Systems Inc. and Hyperchip Inc., Pluris was trying to reinvent the core router, an area dominated today by Cisco Systems Inc. and Juniper Networks Inc. Banking on carriers' inability to keep up with soaring Internet traffic, the startups were designing massive routers that could handle enormous numbers of connections and routing options more efficiently than the Cisco or Juniper architectures.
Pluris chose to develop a distributed system, in which separate routers could behave as a single large system. Avici likewise used a distributed model and began shipping for revenues in 2000, cracking the Cisco-Juniper duopoly ever so slightly.
Pluris wasn't so lucky, having never managed to get its TeraPlex router to general availability. Meanwhile, the telecom recession scaled back carriers' demands for the core, with few carriers planning the kind of massive expansion that would call for the TeraPlex's size and complexity.
Because the rocky economy makes acquisitions of entire companies unlikely, failing startups have followed a pattern of dismissing employees first, then selling the technology on the cheap. That's probably the fate in store for the work now locked inside Pluris' development labs, employees said.
"The technology's not worth anything without the people — I don't know why they don't understand that," one employee said.
