OpVista Gets Chief, Eyes Cable Operators
By ANDREW SIMONS
Irvine startup OpVista Inc. has a new chief executive with a few words of advice: Focus on cable customers instead of telecommunications right now.
“I wouldn’t say we’ve switched,” said T. Gary Trimm, who recently joined OpVista, relieving founder Winston Way who’s now chief technology officer. “We can adapt the technology to work for both cable and telephone systems.”
OpVista makes a box that sits on the edge of a metropolitan network and increases the amount of data that can be carried along an existing fiber line.
The company originally targeted phone companies for its device, as it could boost the data that could be carried over existing lines. But with telecom carriers not investing in their networks, cable seemed a better avenue right now, Trimm said.
“OpVista had recognized with a few customer engagements that they had something,” he said. “That’s part of what I was recruited for.”
Before joining OpVista, Trimm worked as a cable business consultant. He was chief executive at cable industry company Compression Labs Inc. in San Jose. Before that, Trimm was president of the subscriber systems and the North American divisions of Scientific-Atlanta Inc. He’d worked there since 1988.
The company has raised nearly $30 million so far from big funds such as Incubic LLC of Mountain View and Sevin Rosen Funds of New York.
OpVista has stayed afloat despite hard times. The last funding round for the company was a year and a half ago, in which time the company pared down its staff to 23 people from around 40.
Trimm said he’s weighing whether the company needs more funding to get a prototype version of OpVista’s product ready.
The company hopes to have customer trials in place by the end of the second quarter.
