KARACHI, Feb 8: A stress has been laid down to focus on such values which could immediately address customers’ pain and meet their demand before getting engaged in product development and marketing.

This was stated by co-founder and vice-president, Business Development & chief strategy officer Cyras Systems, USA, Rafat Pirzada at a presentation “How to Build a Multi-Billion $ Company — The Cyras Way”, organized by chairman, Jaffer Group of Companies, Haamid N Jaffer here on Thursday.

The speaker, who is presently on a short visit to Pakistan, suggested to a select group of industrialists and businessmen present on the occasion to ensure basic rules of confidence-building and transparency while running their corporate entities.

Mr Pirzada said the success of his company — Cyras, founded in 1998 — had been primarily based on key points such as strong management team (get people even smarter than yourself), targeting larger and greater markets, ability to make a product to sell to such customers who can pay their bills or customers who have deep pockets with no holes.

He said Cyras Systems was built with a distinct vision to design a series of evolutionary network elements that would redefine existing telecommunications paradigms and price bandwidth models.

As a result of this, he said, the Cyras products received significant attention for their ability to execute and bring such a complex product to fruition in such a short period of time.

This recognition raised the awareness of the industry’s largest players and eventually led to company’s acquisition by CIENA Corporation for $2.6 billion in December 2000. The acquisition was greeted with much enthusiasm by financial analysts and stands as one of the largest in Silicon Valley history.