Schoffstall's Ventures Go Way Beyond PSInet
Dave Aiello wrote, "Last week, we pointed out that PSInet was on the verge of bankrupcy. PSInet's financial difficulties largely stem from fruitless diversifications from its core Internet backbone business that consumed a great deal of the company's financial resources. This is important to us because of the firm's historical connection to Martin Schoffstall '82 and to Rensselaer, which has a big involvement in NYSERNet from which PSInet spun off."
"Since then, I have been looking around the Internet to find information about Martin Schoffstall's work outside PSInet. After all, he left PSInet as Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer in 1996."
"I found a good deal of useful information about his work at schoffstall.com, a sort of meta-Web Site for his family, investments, and consulting services. If you take a look at the team he has assembled and their client roster, it's pretty obvious that they are doing well and they have a diversified business."
Dave Aiello continued:
It also appears that they are running a venture capital firm with investments that are independent of the consulting business.
In addition, I looked into the point that the September 2000 issue of Rensselaer Magazine made when it referred to Martin Schoffstall as the co-author of the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). This was confirmed by the fact that he is listed as one of the co-authors of RFC 1067 published by the Internet Engineering Task Force. SNMP is a fundimental building block of Internet reliability, as evidenced by the dozens of books listed on Amazon.com about SNMP.
For those of you who follow what we post on this Web Site, no one pressured me to write a follow-up story. However, it is certainly possible to take the PSInet story out of context and think that it meant that, somehow, Martin Schoffstall has been ruined financially by the company's financial troubles. Therefore, it seemed like a good idea to try to put his current interests and those of his family into perspective.
Finally, in discussions I have had with other members of the RCNJ Leadership Committee, we have consistantly agreed that many alumni are interested in news about major companies founded or managed in some significant way by Rensselaer graduates. This is why we point these developments out, good or bad, as they occur.
If you see a news item that you think we ought to publish in the Alumni News section of RCNJ.org, please let us know by submitting it as a story idea.