Cisco to buy Indian-American founded firm for $89 million
Monday, 28 June 2004, 19:30 IST
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NEW YORK: Cisco Systems has announced it is acquiring part of the engineering team, intellectual property and selected assets of Procket Networks of California that was co-founded by Sharad Mehrotra for $89 million. Procket is a developer of concurrent services routers and has expertise in silicon and software development. On completion of the all-cash deal, Cisco will own Procket's entire intellectual property portfolio, a press release said. Its engineers will become part of its routing technology group led by senior vice presidents Prem Jain and Mike Volpi. According to research consultants Thomson Venture Economics, the endgame for Procket comes after a steep slide from its position as one of the most valued venture-financed companies in the US worth $1.55 billion in 2002. Procket was co-founded in March 1999 by Sharad Mehrotra, William Lynch and Tony Li with the common goal of developing products to help improve Internet infrastructure. Mehrotra and Lynch came from microprocessor backgrounds and together worked on several generations of Sun Microsystems' microprocessors, while Li has been a prominent Internet scientist who has worked at Cisco and Juniper. A PhD in computer science from the University of Illinois, Mehrotra is currently president and chief executive of Fabric7 Systems and chairman emeritus of Procket. He has spent over 20 years in the computer industry and in academia. Prior to founding Fabric7 Systems, Mehrotra was an entrepreneur-in-residence with New Enterprise Associates and central processing architect at Sun Microsystems. He has also worked as integrated circuit designer with Silicon Systems, Inc. of California.
Source: IANS
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