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The San Diego Union-Tribune People To Watch Column

Posted on: Friday, 8 October 2004, 06:00 CDT

Oct. 8--Ken Kalb co-founded Continuous Computing Corp. in 1998 to provide computer infrastructure to the telecom market. The privately held firm is focused on voice-over-packet and wireless businesses. Its customers are telecom network equipment makers such as Cisco and Lucent. Headquartered in San Diego, the company has about 210 employees.

QUESTION: How did Continuous Computing get started.

ANSWER: I co-founded the company about seven years ago with five other guys. We had the idea of building telecom computers for core infrastructure. We each threw in $10,000 and started working in the living room.

Lo and behold, the company took off, and we've been able to raise an additional $48 million over the past seven years to grow the business to where it is today. The idea was we wanted to provide turnkey systems that had all the building blocks necessary for deploying a central office computer. These are computers that are specially designed to handle voice traffic, to handle wireless traffic, to handle integration of voice, data and images basically all on one system.

Q: How do you stand out from competitors?

A: Our differentiation is having a complete solution set. That solution set includes a tremendous amount of software for management, control of the system in the network and then scaling it over very long life cycles.

One of the most interesting aspects of the products we build is they have to stay around in the network for five or 10 years, and you have to have very special hardware and software so you can service and maintain them.

So you have to be able to scale it in such a way so that when you want to upgrade the software or change disk drives or reconfigure memory, you have things like load balancing so the service continues to run. That's where we really specialize and focus our expertise.

Q: Can you explain a complete solution set a little more?

A: We have all of the software that would allow voice to move over the (local area network) or the Internet. We have all of the processing power that would manipulate voice traffic. We have all of the switching environment that would move it from one location to the next, and we have that configured in such a way so that it's fault tolerant, meaning that if something happens to the network, it has a redundant component so it can re-route traffic. If something happens to the computer itself, we (switch) some of the processing to a redundant computer. Even if the software breaks, we have special software that enables it to check for software faults and migrate the application. What about your job keeps you up at night?

What keeps me up at night is making sure we stay on task and we're executing to capture as much of the dream as we originally envisioned was possible. Our goal is $100 million in revenue a year, and hopefully if the market comes back, we should be a very viable and vibrant publicly held company.

Q: What about your job do you brag about?

A: I love putting together an extraordinarily gifted team. One of the most fun things about this is you get to field a ballclub where you know you will always win.

KEN KALB

--Company: Continuous Computing Corp.

--Title: chairman, chief executive, co-founder

--Age: 49

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(c) 2004, The San Diego Union-Tribune. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News. For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.

LU, CSCO,

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