Standard Innovation

I had dinner a few years ago with the founders of Woven Systems, Dan and Bert, to help them with their business plan. It's nice to see their press release today. The analysts are excited about Woven's Ethernet Fabric Switch, and now the bloggers are weighing in, too.

If it all works, Woven's innovative ethernet switch implementation will replace Fibre Channel. While innovation within a standard is hardly an emerging idea, Woven is an exceptionally good example of standards innovation. The business plan focuses on the problem of data center network congestion, and employs ASIC-based data traffic management algorithms that work with off-the-shelf ethernet to re-route traffic through congestion quickly enough that computers don't notice.

Recently, researchers have suggested scrapping the Internet and starting from scratch. Since early Internet designers were not concerned with issues like data center congestion, security, or financial transactions, the thinking goes, a fresh start will bring enough benefits to warrant the gigantic replacement of existing Internet infrastructure.

Innovations like Woven's data center switch prove that established standards like ethernet, with all their attendant R&D, grow harder and harder to displace. If you want to create a great start-up, find a pervasive problem caused by a standard and innovate within that standard.