You can sum up Asera's appeal in a name: Vinod Khosla. The uber-venture capitalist founded the company and drives its strategy, attracting a superstar lineup of directors and reeling in big-name corporate customers.
Network industry big shots on Asera's board include former Oracle President Ray Lane, Cisco CIO Peter Solvik, FedEx CIO Robert Carter and Janpieter Scheerder, president of network storage at Sun.
Asera's focus is helping manufacturers interact with distributors, resellers and direct customers over the Web. It claims it can get companies marketing, selling and supporting their products over the Web in just 90 days. The company offers its software both as a managed service and through licenses. Its third-party and homegrown code is modeled after Cisco's and Dell's e-commerce systems. With its e-business software shipping for 20 months, Asera has signed up customers such as Cadence Design Systems, Extreme Networks and Wyse Technology.
The environment at Asera is fast-paced and intense for its 375 employees. Conference rooms are named after the word for speed in different languages, such as the German “geschwindigkeit.” Indeed, the company's software engineers work so frenetically that Asera has reserved a wing of a nearby hotel to accommodate them.
