by Ripley Hotch, Editor
Jeff Lawrence likes complicated stuff. He co-founded Trillium Digital Systems 10 years ago as a consultancy, and over the years has grown it to an $15-million+ company that makes SS7, IP, X.25, ISDN, ATM, frame relay, H.323, and internetworking communications software that can be hooked together into protocol stacks. Trillium’s software is used by just about every name vendor in networking: 3Com, Alcatel, Ascend, AT&T, Bay, Cisco, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, Lucent, NEC, Newbridge, Nortel, Qualcomm, Rockwell, Siemens, Toshiba, and Xylan, among others.
In some ways, Trillium looks like the Microsoft of networking. But if you ask Lawrence about it, he just laughs. Customers pay a one-time license fee, and he doesn’t plan to change that, unless it’s convenient for the customer. That makes his software a bargain.
In fact, he goes to great lengths to be an honest broker in the industry. Obviously, creating the software for all these powerful competitors puts Trillium in the position to know some pretty sensitive information. Lawrence maintains a strict neutrality.
"We have been very careful to be neutral," he says. "We are very proud of the fact that in 10 years in business, we have never had any company say, ‘We told you guys what our plans were here, and our competitor found out about it.’ People are developing lots of new software. A year or two years out we are aware of what is happening, and many people that are developing products are competitive with each other, so we are perceived as neutral in the industry, and we are very consistent about that."
He’s also careful not to use the company’s development skills unfairly: "There have been times when people [ask], ‘You provide a moratorium, and if you do this for us first, then you can go and sell it to someone else?’ We have walked away from a couple of deals where people asked us to do this. It's great economics from a short-term perspective, but it just isn't true to our direction, our philosophy, and we say, ‘Sorry, can't do it.’ "
That doesn’t mean, however, that Lawrence won’t share his insight into the direction of networking—he’s a frequent speaker at conferences and trade shows, and cheerfully sits down for an hour to explain the Intelligent Network to a data-oriented network manager. Given where Trillium is situated, he’s one of the few technologists who is firmly rooted in all the aspects of the converging network technologies.
"Trillium is at the crossroads," says Chris Nicoll, senior analyst for Current Analysis, an on-line analytical firm. "They’re well positioned for vendors trying to move into new markets and technologies. The data guys need to acquire a sophisticated protocol suite that absolutely has to be certified (by Bellcore) so you have to buy it. Trillium has a full protocol suite to fit where the data guys don’t have it. Conversely, you’ve got all the circuit switch guys who have to move to IP and they need to pick up the other half of the protocol stack."
Lawrence got where he is by curiosity and a love of solving complicated problems that led him to look at protocols earlier than almost anyone else.
He graduated from UCLA in 1979 with a degree in electrical engineering, eventually going to work for the communications division of Amdahl.
"I had not studied communications at all, but it was an interesting job," he says. From writing microcode, he went on to work in various parts of the packet switching group, including product planning. "At the time AT&T was being broken up and they were buying a lot of our packet switches for internal networks of 10,000 or 20,000 users."
While at Amdahl he met and worked with Larisa Chistyakov, founding partner and now chief technology officer of Trillium.
Amdahl eventually moved the division to Richardson, Texas, but most of its engineers chose to stay in California. Both Lawrence and Chistyakov went to Doelz Networks to put together some LAN/WAN products with X.25 capabilities. The company had financial problems and laid the two engineers off.
That was in early 1988, and that’s when Trillium was born.
"I had always wanted to try to start a company, and Larisa and I had talked a lot about the opportunity," Lawrence says. He thinks getting laid off was the best thing that could have happened.
"It's ironic that at that time my wife was working for an aerospace company, and we talked about Trillium and what that would mean for our lives," he says. New companies are always chancy, and both of them thought her job was for life. "Well, she got laid off in the first aerospace crunch and Trillium is still in business," he says.
Meanwhile, Chistyakov had been working on portable software with another company, eventually joining Lawrence in Trillium after about six months. That was when they decided to create some products.
"We bought a 286 PC and a couple of folding tables and opened a little office in West Los Angeles." They created the fundamental architecture of the product line, called TAPA (Trillium Advanced Portability Architecture). The first real product was for X.25. Customers showed up. Then the two heard about ISDN, and, says Lawrence, "We needed to teach ourselves what ISDN was. We did. Then we went and developed ISDN software."
That has been the pattern since: Hear about a protocol, learn about it at the beginning, create a product. Because Trillium develops all its own software, it is able to license products directly to customers, and all the products—60 or 70 by now—work together.
"After we taught ourselves ISDN, I think frame relay followed that. SS7 was something we were hearing about—a nice complicated protocol," Lawrence says. "It sounded like something that would be interesting to us. I remember spending a lot of time in the research library at UCLA trying to pull up what there was about this protocol, to understand what it was. We knew nothing about it. We taught ourselves that. We went into the whole thing, really with the focus of not just creating one product, and we came from a systems perspective building big iron, so the complicated stuff, something scalable, flexible, always was of interest to us."
From his unique position, Lawrence has an interesting view of the changing field of communications. What he sees might not be comforting to network managers: simpler and easier-to-manage networks are not just around the corner.
"I'd like to believe managing networks will get simpler, and I think the intentions are that it will," he says. "I know it is not going to be in the next year or two. I think there is a lot that has to be done to get there. With the advent of a much more open kind of approach in developing platforms, I think there are the right pieces to make it simpler for people. The pieces are starting to show themselves, and now somebody has to start stitching them together."
An easier-to-manage network, in Lawrence’s view, has more intelligence and the accessibility provided by the telephone network. What everyone wants is to be able "to move around, have equipment move around, have the network find it, understand where it is, communicate with it. In the telephony world it used to be that all the intelligence was wrapped up in the switch. The promise of the intelligent network was that intelligence was being moved out of the switch and onto the platforms, so that you create your services on the platform. Then these services manipulate your switching fabric, capacity, and bandwidth so that you can develop and deploy services more quickly."
Lawrence thinks that the services will be provided, not by the carriers as they are now, but by a whole group of companies that understand those services.
"As you get this stuff on a platform, why should the platform be under the carrier's control? Some people might want to put it in the users’ offices so they can create their own configuration."
He says the separation of carrier and service "will result naturally from regulatory and competitive pressures. There is typically only one wire into the house. Today it is controlled by a telephone company that not only maintains the wire but also provides service. In the future I can imagine there will be one company that maintains the wire (with one level of economic return) and one or more companies that can connect to that wire and provide their services (and receive a different level of economic return). There are different skill sets and expertise needed to provide and maintain basic infrastructure such as wires to the house and fiber optic cables across the country as compared to running service platforms and maintaining data warehouses. Each of these has a different value add, and I think there will be some differentiation between companies as a result of this."
What else does he see? A huge increase in bandwidth (one big pipe based on wave-division multiplexing) that will then be traded like electrical power; nanoprocessors that will integrate processors, DSPs, RAM, and ROM on one tiny chip; C language being replaced by Java; very fast wireless access providing universal mobility.
The network of the future, with all this bandwidth, all this power, and all these services, will require very complicated algorithms and protocols. It’s the kind of challenge Jeff Lawrence loves, and you can bet he’ll be in the middle of all those changes.