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Company Interview Excerpt
DENNIS BARSEMA - REDBACK NETWORKS INC (RBAK)


Full article published: 06/15/2000


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TWST: Could you begin by giving us a brief overview of Redback Networks, Inc.? Then describe what you see as the business and company today?
Mr. Barsema: Redback Networks was incorporated in September of 1996. So the company is three and a half years old. We started shipping product in the 1Q of 1998, about 18 months after the inception of the company. Some of the things that we like to bring up are that Redback has a great reputation for being very fiscally responsible and the fact that we do believe that start-up companies should show a profit ' Or at least we have an obligation to track towards profitability and not just spending money. But Redback, in getting to our IPO, we used less than $60 million worth of VC money. So we raised a relatively small amount of money in terms of getting our product out and getting to IPO to kind of carry that fiscal theme forward to today. When we announced our 4Q results for 1999, we announced our 1Q profitability. We had $.4 profit in the most recent quarter. But going back to the history of the company, we've been shipping product now for eight quarters. We have in excess of 150 customers worldwide. Our customers are primarily service providers, which are comprised of carriers like Bell Atlantic and SBC. It's comprised of ISPs like EarthLink or UUNet. Generically, the ISPs and the carriers are kind of referred to as the service provider markets. That's our market and that's who we're selling to. The equipment that we're selling is really building the infrastructure for broadband networks. So I think that's one of the reasons why Redback has been so closely followed and watched by the investment community and it's very clear that broadband, be it DSL or cable or wireless, whatever the medium maybe, is the wave of the future. Redback is helping to build the infrastructure of the networks to support broadband access to the Internet. Our product allows for massive scalability, provisioning and deployment of value- added services for the service provider customer. In terms of employees, I was employee number 31 with the company. I joined the company in the fall of 1997, so I joined 12 months after the company was incorporated and five months before we started shipping product. Redback is up to more than 550 people. Redback has had significant growth over the last two years. On November 29, 1999 we announced a merger with Siara Systems. That was a pretty big mark on Wall Street and I think a pretty big splash in the marketplace in general because it's the first time that a company that had gone public acquired another pre-product, privately held company, which is what Siara Systems was. We will ship the Optical product, called SmartEdge_, for revenue in the 3Q of the year 2000. And the price tag was $4.3 billion. The shareholders of the former company's stock hold approximately 38% of the combined company. Redback's shareholders hold the remaining 62% of the combined company. So I think it was a very bold step in the eyes of a lot of shareholders, a very bold step in the eyes of a lot of customers, but it's one that's been received just tremendously well. Clearly it's been well received on the Street. It's been very well received by our customers because what Redback has done is we've defined now what we're calling the 'New Access Network.ý That is the network the market space that we are going after. These products take us all the way from the core router out to the very edge of the high-speed access network. It's allowing us to provide,massively scale the subscribers that can be supported on our customer's network. We are collapsing in a number of different transports and a number of different products into one product out at the edge of provider's location, either a central office or a regional day at the center. So very clearly the new access network is where the market is headed. Redback feels we have the early mover advantage in that space and we look to be the dominant player in the access space specifically the new access networks. We now have 550, of which over 330 of them are software or hardware developers, we have a very robust engineering organization. We have over 100 people worldwide in our sales organization.

 

Tickers included in this excerpt: RBAK

 

For more information call (212) 952 7433. The Wall Street Transcript does not endorse any of the comments made by interviewees, and does not make stock recommendations.