February - 2012 issue > Cover Story

By Vimali Swamy

One may often wonder, if there is any single magic formula that one needs to crack to be successful entrepreneur. Most entrepreneurs would agree that it is rather a combination of different factors that make or break them — the passion, belief in one self and more importantly, the ‘eureka moment’ when you realize that you have the ability to meet or create the need for something that has been eluding the market for long.

When Syed Ali founded Cavium in 2000, he started with an idea of developing security processors, something the industry had not heard of but was in need of. Late 90s and early 2000s was the era of Internet. Ali saw that the Internet was expanding more and more into business communications and e-commerce, both of which required high security communication. Believing that security could be significantly enhanced by silicon technology, his company successfully offloaded all the heavy computational work onto silicon, which had not been done before.

Just as Intel & AMD builds processors for PCs and servers, Cavium builds processors for different markets including networking, storage, wireless and security. It processes the new wave of data and secures it too. Today, the company provides highly integrated semiconductor processors that enable intelligent networking, communications, storage, video and security applications to worldwide markets and boasts.

From a Startup to IPO

Being first if its kind, Cavium since its early days had attracted quite a lot of attentions from venture capitalists. Menlo Ventures had started investigating the security processor market in early 2002 with the premise that as networking speeds continued to increase, general purpose CPUs would be insufficient to handle ever-increasing processing needs. Products from all public and private companies were evaluated, and assistance was received from design teams at Cisco and F5, who were doing their own research.

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