It was a quiet departure.
Gary Trimm, the cable industry veteran who helped revamp Irvine-based OpVista Inc.’s strategy, has left the company to join Concurrent Computer Corp. in Duluth, Ga.
Trimm is staying on OpVista’s board.
“He was just kinda camping out in California,” said Ron Foster, formerly OpVista’s vice president of marketing who took over as chief executive after Trimm left. “He’s tied to Atlanta, so when the opportunity with Concurrent came along, it was in the right location. He probably decided it was too good to pass up.”
Trimm was the second chief executive for 4-year-old OpVista.
Winston Way, a former engineering professor at the University of Pennsylvania, founded OpVista. Way, the company’s chief technology officer, was OpVista’s first chief.
The gear maker produces a box that sits on the edge of a network and ups the amount of data that can be carried along an existing line. OpVista originally targeted phone companies for its device, with its potential to boost data carried over older lines.
But with telecom carriers not investing in their networks, Way needed to find another direction for his company. So he hired Trimm, who had OpVista target the cable industry as well.
Before joining OpVista, Trimm worked as a cable business consultant. He was chief executive at cable industry company Compression Labs Inc. in San Jose. Trimm earlier was president of the subscriber systems and the North American units of Scientific-Atlanta Inc. He had started at Scientific-Atlanta in 1988.
Trimm was responsible for bringing Foster on board.
“We worked in Atlanta together (at Scientific-Atlanta),” Foster said. “We’re friends and colleagues.”
The company didn’t make a formal announcement of Trimm’s departure or Foster’s appointment.
“We didn’t feel it was necessary,” said Brian Drachman, vice president of product marketing at OpVista. “We didn’t want to publicize that our CEO left.”
OpVista has raised nearly $30 million in venture funds from Incubic LLC of Mountain View and Sevin Rosen Funds of New York. Trimm was instrumental in helping raise another $10 million last year from internal sources.
The company also recently added another new face to its executive roster,that of Andrew Nguyen, who joined OpVista as vice president of engineering.
“Andrew comes to OpVista with a terrific track record developing engineering organizations and processes in the optical system industry,” Foster said. “His skills will be invaluable as we continue to accelerate product development and ramp production.”
In Time for the Holidays
Irvine-based Blizzard Entertainment’s latest “World of Warcraft” video game hit stores with a bang. The company said 240,000 copies were sold in the first 24 hours.
It’s Blizzard’s entry into a relatively recent type of game called “massively multiplayer” games. Multiplayer formats have gamers facing off against each other via the Internet. “Warcraft” has been in production for nearly four years.
“After an extensive and extremely successful beta-testing period for ‘World of Warcraft,’ we are especially proud to now be releasing the game to the public,” said Mike Morhaime, Blizzard’s president and cofounder.
Earlier this year, Blizzard put out a call for 10,000 people to test the new game. Blizzard got 400,000 offers. There was a similar response in Europe.
Blizzard is going after a new gaming model: recurring revenue. The company plans to charge online “Warcraft” players a monthly fee to play. The monthly subscription costs $14.99 per month, a three-month plan costs $13.99 per month and the six-month plan costs $12.99 per month.
Will players be willing to pay to play?
“This has been our most ambitious undertaking to date, and despite the epic size and scope of the game, we believe it fully meets the high standards that we’ve set for all Blizzard games,” Morhaime said. “We’re confident that both experienced and novice players alike will be delighted.”
Morhaime said the company looks “forward to hearing their thoughts about the game.”
Beaming Broadcom
Irvine-based chipmaker Broadcom Corp. recently unveiled a decoder chip designed for consumer set-top satellite boxes.
The chip uses novel graphic technology that requires less memory on a set-top box. Broadcom designed the chip with a customer in mind,News Corp.’s DirecTV Group Inc.
“DirecTV communicated its direction to Broadcom earlier this year and Broadcom has shown its ability to react quickly to our requirements,” said Roger Lambert, DirecTV’s vice president of engineering. “We are impressed with Broadcom’s integration capabilities and also with the anticipated cost reduction in this very competitive sector.”
Last week, Broadcom also said it nabbed a chip supply deal with Scientific-Atlanta.
Broadcom is set to ship an undisclosed number of chips that Scientific-Atlanta will use in its voice-over-Internet-protocol phone adapters.
