December 10, 2004

Nothing Ever Goes to Waste

Attended a TIE San Diego meeting featuring B.V. Jagadeesh, CEO of NetScaler on Wednesday night.

Before NetScaler, Jagadeesh was co-founder and CTO of Exodus. Remember Exodus?

Jagadeesh spent a lot of time talking about the dot-com bubble burst in general and Exodus' decline in specific. Some data points:

  • Exodus founded 1994, 2 employees, $10,000 personal savings
  • Went from 2-4000 employees in less than 5 years
  • At its peak, Exodus served 40% of the Internet's traffic
  • $0.00 to $1,000,000,000.00 in annual revenues in 5 years
  • 80 square feet to 5,000,000 square feet of leased space in 5 years thanks to all the data centers
  • At its peak, Exodus commanded a $28 billion market cap.

Jagadeesh said the straw that broke the camel's back for Exodus was its ill-fated acquisition of Cable and Wireless in early 2001, when signals were already strong in the market that a massive correction was underway and yet they went ahead and did the deal.

He also spoke of the incredible push to build more and more data centers all over the country and the world, at a time when the data centers averaged only 20% occupancy rates.

One particular data center he mentioned: Atlanta. He couldn't understand why they built this huge data center out in the middle of nowhere.

Well, fast forward to today.

Nothing ever goes to waste. Google now occupies the data center.

Battelle mentioned it here and over here is a local Atlanta newspaper story about it (annoying but free registration required). Google's trying to keep mum about its new Georgia presence (well, except in Craigslist).

Posted by brian at December 10, 2004 11:17 AM | TrackBack

Comments

Yeah, I remember Exodus. They bought the company I worked at around 1999, and eventually laid off the majority of employees in early 2001. But not before I got to see the Chicago data centers, which were masterworks of James Bond level technology. Man-traps, Star-Trek-style entry doors, climate-controlled rooms that could pinpoint the A/C changes to within a few feet, locker rooms and showers for overnight workers.... They were so fancy that you couldn't believe there wasn't some crack team of high-tech thieves trying to break into the place, right then and there.

Posted by: jima at December 10, 2004 12:17 PM

Exodus didn't buy Cable and Wireless. Cable and Wireless bought Exodus and Digital Island, then renamed them "Exodus", and then renamed them all "Cable and Wireless USA (C&W USA)". Later, the american datacenters of Cable and Wireless US were sold to Savvis Communications, and have been renamed to Savvis.

Posted by: Jason Scott at December 11, 2004 03:24 PM

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