Bucky89, I had a thought about ASND's coup in getting Bruce Sachs from SRA. Chambers has repeatedly said CSCO is uninterested in mergers with companies from outside the SF Bay Area because he thinks cross-country mergers don't work. I always thought it was, frankly, silly for a networking firm to make this statement. Isn't the whole idea of the Internet to make the world a very small place? If a networking firm can't efficiently run operations across the country, who can? Anyway, it seems to me that Mory/ASND took the seemingly-effective but limiting CSCO strategy and turned it to ASND's advantage, i.e., Cascade and now Stratus in Massachusetts. Comments anyone?
As part of the agreement, Stratus's well-regarded chief executive, Bruce I. Sachs, 38 years old, would head up Ascend's telecom business. Last year, Ascend attempted to recruit Mr. Sachs, say people familiar with the matter, but he declined the offer because he wasn't interested in leaving the Boston area.
Mr. Sachs had previously worked at Bay Networks Inc. and had been brought to Stratus last May to help get its house in order and prepare for a possible sale. Ascend first approached Stratus about a possible deal several months ago while the two companies were engaged in a project with MCI Communications Corp. |
