It’s early November, so it must be time for Anagran Inc., the flow-based routing company founded by Internet pioneer Lawrence Roberts, to appoint a new president and CEO. John Peters, previously CEO of data loss prevention company Reconnex, now occupies the top management post at Anagran, the company announced today.
The news of this leadership change comes just a year and three days after Anagran announced former Polycom executive and LongBoard founder Kim Niederman as its president and CEO. Anagran made no mention of Niederman in its release announcing the Peters news. The company did not immediately return calls seeking comment details of the executive changes and what happened with Niederman.
The news also comes less than two months after Anagran closed on $8.6 million in financing during its D round. The company’s existing venture capital investors ─ Advanced Technology Ventures, ArrowPath Venture Partners, and Draper Fisher Jurvetson ─ participated in the D round, which will help expand Anagran’s global sales presence and further bolster its engineering resources.
Anagran sells a flow-based router, which was engineered to deliver the QoS required by real-time traffic like video and voice. It’s the second venture around flow-based routing founded by Roberts, who first tried to get a flow routing solution off the ground through a now-defunct company called Caspian.
Of course, the funding is a good sign, but Anagran also appears to face a difficult, uphill climb given its apparently limited number of customers and the increasingly difficult economy. The company recently announced that Entiretec purchased five of Anagran’s FR-1000 products for installation in the Movenpick Hotels and Resorts in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where the devices will be used to deliver custom HD video, voice and data services. However, the Anagran Web site doesn’t display any evidence of additional customers, and at NXTcomm in June, Roberts told xchange that Anagran had yet to publicly announce any customers.
But it sounds like Peters, Anagran’s new leader, could be the right man to lead the climb. In addition to working for Reconnex, which was purchased by McAfee in September, Peters worked for several venture capital firms to serve as interim chief executive at a number of early- to mid-stage communications venture-backed companies. He held this position at such companies as Netli Inc. and Yipes, where he raised customer satisfaction, met revenue objectives and drove the companies to profitability. Peters has also held executive positions at Concentric Network Corp., Pacific Bell Information Services and GTE Telenet, where he worked with Anagran founder Roberts.
