Bigfoot Makes Impression With Killer Cards

Company:

Headquarters: Redwood City, Calif.

Technology Sector: Hardware

Key Products: Killer NIC, Killer Xeno Pro

Year Founded: 2006

Number of Channel Partners: 25 worldwide

Ideal Channel Partner: System builder

Why You Should Care: Bigfoot recently made drastic alterations to its go-to-market strategy -- which now includes the channel -- and its products fit nicely in the high-end, higher margin PC enthusiast market.

The Lowdown: If you've ever played a PC game online, then you know how tenuous your Internet connection can be when that pesky problem of network latency rears its ugly head. Bigfoot Networks decided to tackle the problem and audaciously promised to "end lag now" (the company even had a Web site, endlagnow.org).

While eliminating lag completely is a pipe dream, Bigfoot's Killer technology does alleviate the problem through bypassing the Windows Network Stack and routing a PC game's network traffic through an accelerated network processing unit. Not only does Bigfoot's Killer Network Interface Card (NIC) process network traffic faster than Windows, but it's also designed to free up a computer's CPU.

The company just recently made a drastic change to its business by moving toward an OEM licensing strategy with channel partners instead of a retail-centric approach. "Changing our distribution model has been a huge success so far," Bigfoot CEO Michael Howse said. "It's been a lot of work to switch the business, but we were a small company, and it wasn't reasonable for us to go to market by ourselves."

Bigfoot signed a major partnership in 2008 with Alienware and Dell, and since then has added more than a dozen partners, including gaming-focused system builders. And while Bigfoot's roots are in gaming, the company's technology can be applied to other software. "Killer is great for any kind of real-time technology, whether it's VoIP or videoconferencing," Howse said. "Latency affects a lot of these things."

Earlier this year, Bigfoot added another product line to compliment its Killer NIC models with the Xeno Pro, the company's second-generation network card. And just last month, Bigfoot secured $8 million in venture capital funding, so there'll be no shortage of sightings of this company for the foreseeable future.