InTune hopes to be an Irish Nokia

Firm's plan to make fibre-optic communications infrastructure more efficient could create thousands of jobs here, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON

“OUR GOAL is to become the Nokia of Ireland,” says Tim Fritzley, the garrulous ex-Microsoft executive who is now chief executive of InTune Networks, a CityWest-based company that – until an industry report came out affirming its technological know-how last month – was flying well below most people’s radars.

Except perhaps, the venture funds. In 2007, InTune secured $17.7 million in funding from high-profile VC firms Balderton (formerly Benchmark), Amadeus and Spark Capital. Balderton’s Barry Moloney joined the board in late 2008.

Now, as the company readies its first product for market and goes public for the first time with what its research and development has produced, InTune is confident and clearly not at all reluctant about making big, some would say astonishing, claims.

Fritzley says InTune could well become Ireland’s first major global company and provide thousands of jobs.

Why? Because it says it has solved one of the most critical problems in the development of next generation fibre-optic communications networks, which increasingly form the skeleton on which internet and call traffic is structured.

The problem is the inefficiency and uncertainty of service inherent in the way today’s networks operate. While fibre networks have massive capacity, they are hobbled by the way light is sent through them and the growing maze of switches used to direct traffic through the networks.

Specialists in “tuneable lasers”, the lasers that send data-carrying light through fibre, InTune shifted focus three years ago to create a laser that could self-tune to send different colours of light, in microseconds and on the fly, through fibre (see panel).

This uses fibre capacity more efficiently – up to 80 per cent more efficiently – because different types of traffic can be sent discretely in different coloured frequencies, microseconds apart, in the same fibre, rather than using sets of single-coloured lasers.

In addition, data can be sent directly to its destination IP (internet) address, rather than being routed through multiple networks, servers and switches – on average, a data packet currently has to go through 20 servers often continents apart. And packets can be tracked.

InTune says this allows for massive increases in network capacity, gets rid of most of the switches in the network and achieves a significant drop in energy utilisation (70 per cent energy savings, they claim). It also enables carriers or service providers to guarantee a quality of service. A local network in a region or country using the system can co-exist with the wider internet, though Fritzley expects the system will go into the main internet backbone as well.

For end users, that means bandwidth on demand as needed and glitchless delivery of e-mail, images, video or music, to a computer or any device. Increased efficiency inside existing fibre networks would mean plenty of capacity for the boom in multimedia services like video on demand and to handle the surge in internet-enabled devices that are placing extra demands on networks.

“The result is the carriers have a hugely simplified network and they can sell guaranteed services,” says InTune’s co-founder and chief marketing officer John Dunne. “It’s like having a container of liquid bandwidth and anyone can ask for some.”

Carriers could sell guaranteed services to smaller companies, which could then sell their services to customers. “We’re doing for bandwidth what Amazon did for web services,” says Fritzley.

The company was founded in 1999 by two UCD graduates, Dunne and Tom Farrell (now chief technology officer). InTune’s early work with tuneable lasers established its reputation and won clients including MIT, the European Space Agency, Nasa and Darpa (the US Defense and Advanced Research Projects Agency).

The company has 98 employees in Dublin, of which 90 do RD and half are PhDs, says Dunne. Last December, InTune opened a lab in Belfast as well with 40 employees, to take advantage of the optical networking graduates coming out of Northern universities.

Is it hype? Or, to use the favoured term in the technology industry, “vapourware”? Fritzley, who has worked for GE and Tellabs, was convinced enough by what he saw to leave his role as Silicon Valley-based vice president of global sales and solutions at Microsoft TV to head up the company.

Final proof for company watchers must wait until larger scale deployment into live networks, but Fritzley says the company has extensively demonstrated the product to the leading network carriers, “and the technology has been completely vetted and verified by the carriers”. They are currently working closely with two major carriers as they go to live market service trials this summer.

Dunne says they believe they are three to four years ahead of possible networking competitors such as Alcatel or Cisco, and would have additional market advantage because of their patents. He says they have gone slowly to prove the technology with their potential customers.

If the company does what it expects, it will need to hire hundreds of additional employees in RD and potentially, thousands in services and support, spread between Dublin and Belfast. Hence the “Nokia of Ireland” hopes.

“We have the opportunity to develop an Irish technology corridor,” says Fritzley.