PCN Technology Translates Industrial “Tower of Babel” Networks Into Language of the Internet

it possible to use more than one communications protocol on a line, enabling the wire to be used for both its original purpose, such as monitoring pressure and temperature readings and controlling equipment, and as an intranet running standard Internet communications protocols.

The company says its technology works on just about any type of wire. PCN has even demonstrated that it can convert barbed wire into an Internet-ready communications network.

One of the most interesting applications that Drolet described is converting the wire used in closed circuit TV systems—enabling users to access security surveillance video on the Internet. “Most of our applications are not heavy media applications,” Drolet says. But PCN’s technology can provide what he calls “DVD-quality video” at Internet speeds that range from roughly 8 to 40 megabytes per second—depending on signal noise on the line and the distances involved.

Drolet and Stumpf founded the company in 2004, and it operated mostly as a virtual company with employees in the Midwest, Southeast, and Santa Clara, CA. The company filed for its first patent in 2005 (which was issued in 2007), and hired Venkat Shastri as CEO in 2006, recruiting him from Palomar Technologies, a Carlsbad, CA-based specialist in precision microelectronic automation packaging and assembly systems.

PCN closed on $8 million in a Series A round of funding led by EnerTech Capital of Conshohoken, PA, in 2008, and consolidated its operations in San Diego that same year. Other investors include Joe Kasputys, who was the founding chairman and CEO of Global Insight and a former chairman and CEO of Primark, and Jerre Stead, the former chairman and CEO of Ingram Micro and a former CEO of Square D. Stead is a member of PCN’s board of directors while Kasputys sits on the company’s advisory board, which includes Bill Roper, the former Verisign CEO and longtime SAIC CFO, and Jim Bixby, the former chairman and CEO of San Diego’s SeQual Technologies and Brooktree.

The company now has about 13 employees and seven contract workers, and is preparing to raise its Series B round, which Drolet expects will close sometime during the first quarter of next year. The company also is already generating sales (which Drolet declined to quantify) from its first product.

“We have interest coming in from all over the place,” Drolet says. “We’re pushing some customers away because we can’t serve everybody, so we’re also managing that part” of the company’s growth. To Drolet, PCN is on its way to doing for existing conductive wire what Qualcomm did in the wireless space.

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.