Below is a clipping from a daily news item from
informationweek.com
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TOP STORIES
___Lucent Buys Intelligent-Switch Company____
Lucent Technologies continued its buying spree and fleshed
out its networking line with a $117 million cash acquisition
of intelligent-switch-maker LANNET.
LANNET, a subsidiary of Madge Networks N.V., will pull
Lucent into the intelligent LAN switch business, a market
that Lucent says is growing 20% a year. "As we integrate
more of our customers' complete networks, they're
increasingly looking for an offering that reaches from the
desktop to the WAN," says Bill O'Shea, president of Lucent's
Data Networking Systems group.
LANNET, with customers such as Airobus, BMW, and Peugot,
will also give Lucent inroads to the European market. "It's
a market that we believe is going to be one of the fastest-
growing markets in data networking," O'Shea says, adding
that European companies are migrating from hub and router
systems to switched networks.
Lucent says there is little overlap between its products and
LANNET's, which will fill the gaps in Lucent's low-end
product line. Although Lucent plans to make additional
network acquisitions, LANNET's products, which target the
workgroup environment, are "as close to the desktop" as
Lucent will get.
The 500-person switching company will remain in its home
base of Tel Aviv, Israel, as part of Lucent's Enterprise
Infrastructure Products Group. Its CEO, Shmuel Levy, will
join Lucent as president of the EIPG Israel Technology
Center. LANNET is the latest in a string of Lucent
networking acquisitions; these include remote-access vendor
Livingston Enterprises, Gigabit Ethernet company Prominet,
and network-access equipment manufacturer Yurie Systems.
-- Jeff Sweat
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
LANNET is in 3Com's playground. If 3Com has such "low-margin
products" I wonder why LUCENT feels it needs to be in
this network data space?
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