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Americas Issue: May 2004
BBN’s Grand Re-entrance
by Sean Buckley
Do the @ sign, the Internet, the first router and e-mail all sound familiar? While such things are now taken for granted, each had their genesis in a rather nimble company from Cambridge, Mass., called BBN.
Many thought that BBN was no more — it had been swept up as part of Bell Atlantic’s acquisition of GTE. But the reports of its demise were premature.
Tad Elmer, a veteran BBN employee, will now take on the role of president and CEO of BBN. “One of the things that’s surprised me is that there was a perception in some places that we had gone away. We have been here all this time, but were not growing 100 percent a year and not losing millions of dollars,” said Elmer. “We just toiled away and did our thing. Our customers in the R&D space certainly know who we are, but in terms of the general public’s perception, we have been very quiet, so now we have a chance to blow our horn just a little bit.”
With the help of investors Accel Partners and General Catalyst Partners, BBN’s management recently acquired BBN from Verizon. As part of that acquisition, BBN has established a board of directors that includes Elmer; David Fialkow, General Catalyst Partners; Ken Novack, General Catalyst Partners; Jim Breyer, Accel Partners; and Kevin Efrusy, Accel Partners.
While concentrating on its existing military customer base, BBN does have its eye on the future. Elmer does not see a wholesale shift in BBN’s focus, but the company does plan on developing innovations suited for various commercial markets. Through its investors, BBN will be able to take advantage of various partners to enhance its business. As it has since its inception, BBN will use its technology advancements in areas such as speech/language, high-speed networking and encryption, mobile and security to enhance potential partner products.
One new innovation in network security that BBN pioneered just last year was the development of the first cryptographic quantum network. Where traditional network security methods are based on encrypted keys or complex algorithms that can be intercepted or decoded, quantum cryptographic network security guarantees are based on various quantum physics principles.
Although a commercial cryptographic quantum network is probably at least a few years off for network operators that might need very secure networks, BBN plans to illustrate a model network with nodes at BBN’s facilities, in addition to Harvard and Boston University sites.
The trend of large vendors spinning out divisions as separate entities continues to be hot. BBN joins the ranks of Stratus Technologies and Excel Switching, both of which recently spun out of Lucent as separate companies, following high-profile acquisitions in the late 1990s.
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