Santel gets new CEO, cuts staff

By siliconindia   |   Thursday, 03 July 2003, 19:30 IST
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NEWARK, CA: Santel Networks, provider of high-speed optical networking products, said it has named Sid Agrawal as president and CEO. The company also cut its staff from 28 to 10. The company had shut down its offices for two weeks recently in order to review the current product and realign the company strategy. Agrawal joined Santel in June, replacing former chief Stefan Braken-Guelke, who left the company to pursue other opportunities. Prior to Santel, Agrawal was founder and CEO of Zambeel, a storage startup Agrawal served at Zambeel till June 2001 and had raised $66 million. Zambeel shut down in April this year. Prior to Zambeel, he served as vice president of sales and marketing at Synaptics. He also was founder and CEO of Layer5, which was sold to Juniper Networks in November 1999. Santel has developed an electronic dispersion compensator for 10 Gbps optical networks. The company is of late having difficulty selling to the carrier market. Santel is holding off on marketing its product. The company is scrambling to get out of the telecom market. It is now developing a new product with similar technologies to address the enterprise space. "We had a product in customers' hands. But the volume isn't there in 10 Gigabit optics. We're redirecting our engineering resources to an adjacent space, which we will announce soon," said Agrawal. Dr. Anil Gandhi who is the Director, Systems Engineering founded Santel.

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