Soapstone hiring on eve of control plane launch

Soapstone Networks’ control plane software, PNC, will become generally available this quarter, the company said today on its second-quarter earnings call. And it is bulking up its headcount to prepare for sales.

“We’re building a healthy funnel of opportunity,” Bill Leighton, Soapstone’s chief executive officer, said. “PNC will be deployed with live traffic in the second half of the year. We’re actively engaged with tier-one and tier-two carriers, large enterprises and utilities.”

Equipment vendor Avici Systems created Soapstone in February 2007, seeing no future in its core router business, whose revenue came increasingly from just one customer, AT&T. When the company announced its plan to exit the router business two months later, it predicted beta testing of the Soapstone gear would begin in the second half of the year and generate revenue growth this year. However, the company didn’t begin shipping the beta version of its product until this February.

Meanwhile, the company’s headcount has diminished from the 170 people it employed when it unveiled Soapstone. But this year it has been adding staff in preparation for the new business. The company has hired 29 people so far this year (raising its total to 137) and plans to continue adding staff.

At least one new entrant has followed Soapstone’s lead in creating a control plane for multipoint applications of connection-oriented Ethernet technologies Provider Backbone Bridging (PBB) and Provider Backbone Bridging-Traffic Engineering (PBB-TE, also called Provider Backbone Transport, or PBT). Gridpoint Systems expects its first products to become available in October. And this spring Nortel Networks predicted its own control plane would become available this summer.

Leighton cited as encouraging signs the recent embrace of PBB and PBB-TE by equipment vendors that previously favored other technologies.

“For PBT, the PNC provides restoration, while solving the need for external path computation,” he said. “For PBB, the PNC addresses weak deterministic performance and provides service admission control functions that are higher-order functions tied to the services layer. The role of PNC [in either] is to make carrier Ethernet service-ready.”

Soapstone reported nearly $4 million in revenue for the second quarter, all of which came from its legacy routing business, which it expects to conclude entirely this year. The company shipped its last router in December 2007.