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WHAT MAKES WASABI HOT? Sheer aggression, lust for VxWorks market share, and a $4 million vote of confidence from investors. |
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 by
Nancy Cohen |
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WHAT MAKES WASABI HOT? Sheer aggression, lust for VxWorks market share, and a $4 million vote of confidence from investors. |
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by
Nancy Cohen |
| First,
in the early 1990s, there was Open Source NetBSD, a Unix-compatible
operating system that was Chris-tened by developer Chris Demitrious. Then in
2000 came Wasabi Systems, manned by some key members of the NetBSD core and
its long-time NetBSD project leader. Wasabi would embark on a mission to
prove itself to be a viable Open Source business success story by providing
an Open Source technology along with commercial backing and support. This
tale already has the markings of the typical setting for an Open Source
business startup, but with one distinctive difference: Wasabi is still
standing, and is more aggressive than ever, winning out on impressive annual
rounds of investment financing, winning development relationships with
important vendors like AMD and Intel, and looking to beef up sales
representation in Europe and Asia as well as the U.S.
What’s working in Wasabi’s favor? Trafficking in a handful of cell and desk phone numbers, we finally reach Wasabi Systems CEO, Perry Metzger, this week for some answers. Unfazed by his words being clipped and zapped by Manhattan’s tunnels and avenue roadblocks, Metzger steers the story further as to how Wasabi survived the Open Source fallout and what’s next. |
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Is Wasabi the only NetBSD act in town?
METZGER: As far as we know, we are the only big commercial NetBSD house. The trade press does not seem to go into much detail about NetBSD, only to call it a close relative of FreeBSD and OpenBSD or FreeBSD ‘variant.’ How well do people understood NetBSD? METZGER: It’s like a secret. NetBSD is easily confused with the others, even though many companies are now using NetBSD. We’ve yet to capture the popular imagination. It’s almost unfortunate that they have similar names [BSD variants]. They have their concentrations and we have ours. Can you run the basic distinctions down between NetBSD and FreeBSD? METZGER: FreeBSD runs primarily on PC hardware; its goals mostly are to replace Unix servers; Yahoo uses a large number of PC servers running FreeBSD. NetBSD concentrates on a wide variety of hardware. The major difference between us and FreeBSD is in portability. Our goals are wider portability. We also stress running in systems a little more challenged than the average PC so we have an edge there too; we work better in embedded environments. We work well in server environments; we just don’t target that as a market. Surely you consider this vague perception of NetBSD a problem? METZGER: We’re in a market where being famous doesn’t matter as much as being useful. Remember, our targets are more OEMs than IT planners. |
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Your Meta Group presentation in
April articulated your goals ahead. One goal is forming strategic
partnerships with manufacturers to develop products that target a number of
markets including telephony and to establish a customer base in telecom. The
telecom market is quite volatile.
METZGER: The world is a marathon. You can say ‘this will be a bad year’ but it’s kind of silly. People still use phones and cell phones. Telecom will continue to be a robust field. How far along is Wasabi in expanding your sales team in Asia? METZGER: We don’t yet have a Japanese rep office but we intend to get one in the not too distant future. BSD is strong in Japan; There’s even a BSD magazine published there that covers the BSD marketplace. Wasabi continues to have success in attracting funding. What did you do right that other Open Source companies that went under did not? |
| METZGER:
Well, when you look at the Open Source companies that started coming up
several years ago, you need to ask what was their claim to fame. Some of
them came up in short in providing an answer, particularly if you look at
the dot-com era. In the end, this is a capitalist society. If you fall off
the track with your customers, then you do not continue. Besides, we’re
fortunate to be in the embedded niche.
How so? METZGER: Embedded turns out to be a good niche for Open Source. We’re not competing with the same kinds of forces. On the desktop, it is very difficult to get people to live without Microsoft. In the case of a router, you just care if it functions. We sometimes see a technology CEO, once the business gets off the ground with the technology he’s helped to develop, steping aside, to become insteady something like the CTO, to hand the reins over to a quintessential business type. Wasabi seems to have all the main ingredients: Perry Metzger, one of the NetBSD pioneers, forming a company, growing it, hiring 21 employees, seeing the company through to customer wins and infrastructure OEM relationships. Is it now time for Perry Metzger to step aside? METZGER: That’s certainly not
something I’m planning. Right now, I have a company to run. |
