Cisco Announces Agreement to Acquire CoreOptics
May 2010 by Emmanuelle Lamandé
Cisco announced its intent to acquire privately held CoreOptics Inc., a designer of digital signal processing (DSP) solutions for high-speed optical networking applications.
Based in San Jose, with the majority of its employee base in Nuremberg and Gerlingen, Germany, CoreOptics will enable Cisco to equip service provider customers with highly advanced 100 Gigabits per second (Gbps) transmission technology to scale their networks to meet the demands of rapidly growing Internet Protocol traffic driven by video, mobility and cloud services.
The acquisition of CoreOptics expands Cisco’s optical presence in Europe, builds on its existing European operations in Monza, Italy, and will contribute to continued innovation in optical networking. CoreOptics will bring to Cisco a team with expertise in digital ASIC design, advanced modulation formats, as well as optical systems, applications and network architecture. Upon completion of the acquisition, CoreOptics employees will become part of the Cisco Service Provider Technology Group and work with Cisco’s existing optical engineering teams in Monza, Italy; Bangalore, India; and Richardson, Texas.
Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco will pay approximately $99 million in cash and retention-based incentives in exchange for all shares of CoreOptics. The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close in the second half of calendar year 2010.