"I have a concern about how innovation is going to happen in today's environment," says Estrin. "How will it be funded? How will [companies] be motivated to work on innovative things, instead of the next product cycle?"
Estrin faced such a dilemma herself several years ago when she left Cisco Systems after serving as the company's CTO, a post she attained after Cisco purchased Precept. Her solution was the formation in May 2000 of Packet Design, an incubator research house that has now spun out three separate companies: Packet Design, which sells network route analyzers; Vernier Networks, which builds gateways to help secure wireless networks; and Precision I/O, a start-up with technology designed to improve the networking performance of servers.
Estrin, currently chairman of Precision I/O and Packet Design, is also on the board of Vernier.
Precision I/O focuses on solving what Estrin calls the "first inch" problem--that concerning the movement of packets on and off processors. As the world becomes more IP-centric and demands more server interaction, it also needs new architectures, says Estrin.
"We don't have an efficient server I/O architecture today," she says. Precision I/O, like other competitors in the space, is attempting to solve the problem with technology designed to offload some of the network processing from the central CPU. As applications such as VoIP become more mainstream, solving such network latency problems will take on even greater importance, she says.
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