A network can fail in a particularly irritating way: briefly. Long enough to interrupt somebody’s work, briefly enough to behave itself when an expert arrives. The equipment has recovered its composure. The person responsible for it still owes an explanation. Zane M. Taylor chose to build a company around the distance between those two events.
In Taylor’s account, Sideband Networks began with frustration accumulated over three decades in the industry. He had managed global teams. He wanted a more usable way to understand live network activity. The origin story has the shape of a complaint that survived several changes of employer. Eventually, in 2012, it acquired a company name.
There is something appealingly workmanlike about that beginning. Technical entrepreneurship is often told through a moment of discovery. Taylor’s version allows for a slower education: repeated exposure to a problem, followed by the decision to take responsibility for an answer. An apprenticeship can teach you which questions refuse to retire.
A complaint with a work history
Taylor’s professional background crossed operations, manufacturing and sales. His career included Cisco Systems, Exodus Communications, NetScaler, Citrix and FireEye. These are different vantage points on the same practical obligation: technology has to function for someone beyond the people who designed it. Equipment must reach a customer; a service must keep running; a promise eventually becomes somebody’s job.
His earlier titles included operations director at Exodus and vice president of operations at NetScaler. A career assembled from those responsibilities gives the founding choice a useful context. Sideband entered a field where the purchase could be technical, the installation organizational and the consequences painfully personal for the employee answering the next support call.
Consider the difference between owning a tool and relying on it. Ownership begins with procurement. Reliance begins when something goes wrong and a person reaches for the tool without having time to admire it. Taylor’s move into network analytics can be read as an attempt to work at that second moment. The relevant measure is whether the person looking at the result knows what to do next.
The old colleague and the new company
The early team carried some shared history into the venture. In August 2013, CTO Steven Noble described Taylor as a friend from their Exodus days. Noble was approaching six months at the still-unannounced company. Sideband’s chief executive and its technical leader therefore had a connection that predated the startup’s public introduction.
Noble’s account of those months is wonderfully unceremonious. His advice to a startup CTO included making careful changes of direction, acknowledging small advances and accepting the ordinary physical chores of a young business. Cables, customer deliveries and a desk for a new employee belonged in the same working world as technical strategy.
Those were Noble’s observations, rather than an inventory of Taylor’s own daily tasks. They nevertheless put the company in a recognizable setting. A title does not connect equipment. A plan does not clear a workspace. Small organizations keep returning their executives to the inconvenient fact that work includes things a slide deck tends to omit.
Co-founder Sherman Tang served as chief marketing officer. His background included designing and manufacturing networking, security, server and storage systems. Taylor’s operational experience sat beside a colleague’s product and commercial experience. Their partnership makes the early company easier to understand as a group of practitioners choosing a familiar problem.
His name in the machinery
Taylor’s involvement also extended to a technical invention. US8441961B1, titled Metadata-driven switch network control, names him and Bruce M. Amberden as inventors. Filed on December 24, 2012, it was granted on May 14, 2013, with Sideband Networks identified as the assignee.
The invention describes a system that monitors network conditions and uses metadata to help control switching behavior. Feedback is part of the design: information about the network can inform a subsequent change. Put in ordinary language, the interesting relationship is between watching what happens and doing something with the observation.
A patent describes an invention. A customer installation has to answer a further set of questions about usability, fit and results. Keeping those two things distinct gives Taylor’s technical credit its proper scale. His name belongs on a specific invention; the commercial work still had to make a system useful to people running an actual network.
A flashlight, rather than another map
By May 2014, Taylor was explaining Sideband with a household object: a flashlight. It is a sensible metaphor for a product sold to someone expected to investigate trouble. The image gives a buyer something recognizable to hold on to before the conversation reaches the machinery.
At that point, Sideband offered hardware and virtual appliance versions. The company’s pitch connected real-time network visualization with the ability to understand activity across devices and locations. Taylor emphasized the complications created by a growing population of smartphones, tablets and other devices. The network’s occupants were multiplying, and a fixed picture could become stale.
A flashlight also makes a modest promise. It helps a person look. The person still has to make sense of what becomes visible. That is an editorial reading of Taylor’s metaphor, but it explains why the line travels better than a list of specifications. The customer can imagine a task, a tool and a result without first learning another acronym.
“Now you have a flashlight to shine into the dark and see what is going on.”
Zane M. Taylor / 2014
Capital for an unglamorous problem
The business moved into public view in November 2013. In February 2014, Sideband announced a $6 million Series A financing. The stated purposes included further product development and marketing. The allocation describes two distinct obligations for a young company: improve what it sells and reach people who might need it.
Announced financing for product development and marketing.
Trade recognition arrived in the same early period. CRN included Sideband in its selection of networking startups from 2013 and later in its 2014 emerging data-center vendors coverage. The attention placed Taylor’s company among businesses trying to make changing infrastructure more manageable. It gave the startup a public introduction beyond its own announcements.
Sideband was also a finalist in Gigaom’s Structure 2014 Launchpad. Taylor attended the June conference in San Francisco with colleagues including Tang and engineering vice president Roger Choplin. The calendar now included the outward-facing work of a startup: showing up, explaining the product and giving a room of other people a reason to pay attention.
Funding and selection tell us something about that stage of the company. The more revealing question for Taylor’s chosen business remained close to the original irritation. After the presentation, could the product help someone understand an awkward event on their network? The stage lights eventually go out. The operator’s screen stays on.
The difficult business of being believed
In 2015, Taylor put trust at the center of product relevance. “To make a product relevant, you have to make a product that can be easily trusted,” he said. For a monitoring business, that ambition has practical consequences. A finding asks someone to spend time investigating, and sometimes to change a working system.
An account from that period described an energy-sector customer with intermittent connectivity problems. Its internal team had spent nearly half a year investigating; Sideband’s solution reportedly helped identify a faulty switch in a day. The customer was unnamed, and the episode was a company account. Its significance lies in the kind of result Taylor wanted to sell: a specific culprit in place of a recurring mystery.
The story also explains why an operator might be interested in analytics without being especially interested in analytics as a subject. The useful destination is the switch, the setting or the conversation that needs attention. A tool earns its place by helping someone get there. The calculation is made in working hours, interrupted tasks and explanations that finally hold together.
Where the attention went next
Sideband’s later company descriptions emphasized communications around critical assets. The product proposition used behavioral models to identify departures from ordinary activity and draw attention to potential threats. That changed the emphasis from general connectivity trouble toward the systems and information a business particularly wanted to protect.
The connection to Taylor’s earlier pitch is visible: observation becomes valuable when it helps someone decide where to look. The question grows more focused. Which asset matters? Which communications belong around it? What deserves an investigation? A broad picture of activity has to become a manageable assignment.
Read as a chapter in Taylor’s working life, Sideband is an attempt to give operational frustration a useful form. The career, the colleagues and the invention all sit behind that attempt. Its most human ambition is easy to recognize: when the system misbehaves, the person responsible should have a better place to begin.