How Apple’s Infamous Secrecy Led Another Group of Former Employees to Successful Startup

Several very interesting startups have sprouted up recently, mostly comprised of former Apple employees. Just yesterday, iDrop News detailed Pearl, a company fueled by ex-Apple employees that focuses on high-quality and high-tech aftermarket automobile solutions.

Another startup, also led by former Apple employees, is beginning to make waves in the world of cloud services. The company, called SnapRoute, creates software that helps companies manage their internal and/or external cloud systems more efficiently.

SnapRoute, formed by a team of former Apple engineers, sprung out of a project that Apple titled “Project McQueen.” The goal of the project was to end, or at least lessen, Apple’s reliance on third-party companies such as Amazon Web Services, Azure, and Google Cloud for its iCloud service.

According to SnapRoute CEO Jason Forrester, former global data center manager at Apple, “Project McQueen” was a daunting task. “When I arrived in 2011, Apple had two data centers, mostly handling internal traffic and doling out songs and apps from the iTunes music store. By the time we left, Apple had several more centers stuffed with an incredible amount of network devices to handle billions of Siri and Map queries, iMessages, and cloud services.”

Due to the increase in demand and complexity of the network requirements, the team was forced to seek out new, cutting edge solutions to their problems. In a blog post on SnapRoute’s website, Forrester detailed how they addressed these new issues. “We were dealing with problems our vendors had never contemplated, much less figured out.

We began exploring radically new approaches, including a handful of supposedly open-sourced solutions so we could dive into the guts of our network ourselves – say, to look directly at the data coming off network processors. As much as we wanted these technologies to work, they didn’t.” So the members of the project began to build their own solutions.

However, as the project progressed in exciting ways, Apple’s now-infamous obsession with secrecy began to get to the team. “Slowly, our desire to share our ideas with the world began to overshadow the thrill and pride of working for Apple.” The team left last year to form SnapRoute, and they haven’t looked back since.

SnapRoute looks to provide an open-source software standard for basic switches and routers, so that network engineers don’t have to rely on software designed by the equipment manufacturers. According to their website, their goal is to “free talented network engineers to do their job to the best of their ability, unconstrained by vendor lock in. We think – no, we know – that this could accelerate innovation and reduce cost for thousands of companies.”

The company is already seeing success – working with such big names as HP and Facebook. With the pedigree of SnapRoute’s employees, it’s a safe bet that their software will become commonplace with many large companies in the future.

Do you think Apple would benefit more from being an open book? Why or why not?
Let us know in the comments below!