All about control

Riding on the cusp of a technological wave is among the most exhilarating times for any company. Of course, there's always the danger of getting swamped by the crest or being taken out by the undertow.

But for Jerry Parrick, CEO and founder of Yipes Communications, the thrill of being at the front of the metropolitan optical wave is unmatched. Having served as chairman and CEO of Nokia's high-speed access group and as president of the former U S West !nterprise unit, Parrick is familiar with the spotlight. The difference this time around is that he heads a company at the forefront of a technology that's familiar to many of his customers: Ethernet.

Broken down into its basic services, Yipes provides enterprise users with a gigabit Ethernet connection between LANs that can be located as close as next door or across the country. And while a number of companies claim to be charging into the gig-E market with big pipes, Yipes' plan is about more than throwing huge amounts of bandwidth at the customer.

"We have a very ambitious plan to empower customers to control this network," Parrick says.

Indeed, it's that control factor that makes the Yipes plan different than many others. Coining the term "Just In Time Bandwidth," Yipes' three currently available services let users control the amount of bandwidth they want on a dynamic basis. "We characterize it as an application-aware network," Parrick says.

Though somewhat new to the metro market, Yipes isn't without competition, namely incumbent carriers that have been offering to extend ATM-based services. In response to the gig-E invasion, ATM advocates continually point to the technology's inherent quality of service (QOS) capabilities. However, while Yipes' technology is based on the Internet, it isn't quite the same, Parrick says.

"What [ATM providers] will generally cite is the common knowledge of QOS in the Internet," he says. "The fact of the matter is, the network architecture we're using has several layers of QOS."

The architecture includes queueing behind every port, which lets the company identify different levels of QOS. In the WAN, because the company is buying transit from the largest carriers offering the most stringent service level agreements, it also can enable multiprotocol label switching.

"We have not had a single incident where an MIS director said to us, "No, you don't have enough QOS." Parrick says.

Ironically, Yipes is kicking its buildout into high gear at a time when the investment community has turned sour on a number of other plans. That's particularly true of competitive carriers - a fact with which Parrick is well acquainted. Still privately funded, Yipes has received about $230 million, mostly from venture capital houses.

"I would characterize it as too many entrants in essentially the same market niches," he says. "I don't think you can have 25 or 30 competitors in the same market without there being a shakeout."

In the metro market, though, there's still enough room for differentiation, he adds.

"If I was just offering big fat pipes, then I could say that the service is going to become a commodity," Parrick says. "If I start laying on the capability that I give customers, I'm no longer talking about a big, fat, commoditized pipe. That's actually a value-add."