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Cisco agrees to buy Cerent and Monterey Networks 23

Posted by Hemos from the getting-into-fiber dept.
Neo1 writes to us with the story that Cisco has agreed to buy both Cerent Corp and Monterey Networks for a combined 7.36 billion in stock. This move definitely makes clear Cisco's move into optical networking-especially when their Investor Relations has an overview of Optical Internetworking.
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Cisco agrees to buy Cerent and Monterey Networks More

Cisco agrees to buy Cerent and Monterey Networks

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  • > The purchase of Cerent is Cisco's costliest to date and is the latest sign of the Internet's mind-boggling impact on corporate valuations. Cerent commanded the extraordinary price even though it has posted only $10 million in sales in 2 1/2 years in business and has never turned a profit.

    Sure makes ya think. So far we can tune into audio, video, stocks, text, 3d all over the web. I wonder if stuff like this is still going to happen once we develop a protocol to pipe /reality/ through the Internet's intestines?

    Actually, I'm just being silly. I'm assuming the technologies that Cerent is working on look to be the next big thing inso far as network infrastructure is concerned? Still, it's amazing how the face of business is changing. From RedHat's intergalactic stock launch to this, is common sense losing it's place in business and economics? Are we setting ourselves up for some sort of reality shock? Where is the money actually going to and coming from?

  • I had Cerent on my stock list for next month. Kinda funny. Between these guys and vixel, we should see another Reback/Copper Mountain kinda ctock on the market.
    (for those that don't know, Vixel does fiberchannel stuff for Sun and some others)

  • Because times have been so good, companies are looking for things to spend their cash reserves on.

    Plus, they need to justify their sky-high market caps somehow. This how all the Japanese conglomerates got into so much trouble in the 90's. Remember when everyone was afraid the Japanese were soon going to own America?

    The difference however, is that Cisco is sitting on a huge cash reserve and no debt.
  • Makes it sound like someone rammed them down Cisco's throat.

    "You WILL be rich! You WILL dominate the markets! You WILL take these companies onboard!"

    "Yes, oh master! Please! Stop hitting me with the bit bucket!"

  • Flak wrote:
    Cisco was the first to market with many technologies. All came from the same type of R&D projects.So what does this mean for you and me?


    Maybe it means we should buy some Cisco stock. ;)

    But I don't get your drift about xDSL - are you saying it does or does not have a short shelflife? If you're saying it's basically obsolete already, I disagree -- I think DSL will overtake cable modems for small-business and home connections, and become the technology that everyone uses for years and complains about as slow and old until it's replaced ... like phone lines have been for while.

    timothy

  • The buck makes a move (Score:3)

    by Flak ( 55755 ) on Thursday August 26, 1999 @09:05AM (#1723758) Homepage

    Cerent's first product, for example, can handle 240 gigabits of data a second, the equivalent of 3.8 million phone calls or 160,000 high-speed T-1 lines.

    I think this whole move says one thing very clear Broadband is right around the corner to every computer. Think about what Cisco just did. They put 6.9 billion into R&D err, bought a company and now have technology that will put them above their competitors again. Cisco was the first to market with many technologies. All came from the same type of R&D projects.

    So what does this mean for you and me? Simple we all will have a chance in the near future to have our fiber in our house plugged into a switch that can handle that kind of bandwidth. Humm, and who was it that said xDSL had a short shelflife...

  • Reminds me of Iridium.

    Here you had a great idea (global, satelite network for phones), a huge backer (Motorola, who dumped over 750 million into the project) and a lofty stock price. And it failed.

    Whether they were ahead of their time and the idea never caught on, or they botched up about everything that could go wrong (i would say both), the company went bankrupt.

    the best ideas and technologies do not always work.

    Difference is that Motorola did not own Iridium.
  • ..it's all about time to market and having the experts in the industry. Things in the internet world work at warp speed-- it's simply not possible to "grow" in house experts on new technologies as fast as is required-- the only way to stay on top is to aquire the people that ARE the experts in a given area. Look into it-- Cisco only gets into a market if it can be #1 or #2. One more comment on the people: try to find somebody who works at Cisco who would rather work somewhere else-- I don't think you can!
  • Not sure what you mean by gigabit TCP stack - is this using standard TCP extensions such as window scaling and SACKs to handle long fat pipes (high bandwidth*delay product)? I'd have thought that optical networks have very low delay, so maybe this is something else.

    At the IP level, I think Linux can go at gigabit ethernet speeds in any case, I recall some test where it beat NT. There are definitely several gigabit ethernet cards available for Linux.

    [Having looked around on the Net...] Here's the URL for Trapeze - http://www.cs.duke.edu/ari/manic/tpz_www/trapeze_r oot.html - it seems to be layer 1 / 2 messaging software on BSD for a network called Myrinet - it doesn't include any IP stuff at all, and an unmodified BSD IP stack seems to perform pretty well - latency is in the 100-200 microsecond range, so TCP extensions are probably not necessary.
  • I'd rather have one of those two terrabit pipes. 240 gigabits just doesn't cut it any more. :)

    Seriously, though, this sounds cool. Incidently, whilst we're talking about high-speed networks, there's a gigabit TCP stack (Trapeze) that's out for BSD systems. If high-speed pipes look like they're around the corner, wouldn't it be a good idea for someone to port this to Linux?

  • Cisco's research department consists of about 5 people, compared to 24,000 for Lucent's Bell Labs. Cisco is totally dependent on the companies they buy.
  • If you look at Cerent last year, they only sold about 10 million. They were about to go under had it not been for Mr. Dell (of Dell computers) having invested 25 million. They couldn't even afford the payroll not too long ago.

    Now, for some reason, Cisco feels they're worth 7 billion.

    Kind of odd, I think. There are some happy people in California right now.
  • The big difference is that Iridium was based entirely around low-bandwidth, high-cost mobile voice connections, while optical internetworking is aligned with the trend to converged voice+data networks, and for my money is a good investment. Not sure about the $7bn price tag, but it could well turn out to be reasonable if Cisco sells enough optical kit based on this technology.
  • I believe Cerent is/was expected to have $100mm in sales in two years, so growth is there. Further, it is safe to assume that a router/optical switch with a Cisco name on it is going to sell better than one with Billy Bob on it.

    I guess the belief here by Cisco is that they need this type of technology to effectively compete in the future with Lucent, Nortell, etc., and it is cost-effective for them to aquire it this way. After all, Chambers isn't an idiot.

    You can think of it this way... all of the crazy valuations we see these days are based on potential future revenues. You mentioned $10mm in sales. Look at Amazon... What were their sales three years ago? $15mm? Now they have to be topping a billion. If you saw a company offer a crazy amount for Amazon three years ago based on $15mm in sales, you would laugh. But, look at the revenue (I didnt say anything about profits :) they generate today, and you would call that company brilliant.

    Lastly, I am surprised all of the whiners on the site don't slam Cisco. If you think about it, they are very much like Microsoft. If they can't make a better technology, they buy it. Also, due to their size and footprint, they have defined (could say control) some of the protocol's for network communication, much like MS does with the OS.

    In today's environment, you have to think of potential future value, and the costs associated with developing technology in-house when you assaign valuations. Crazy? Maybe, but then again...

    Signed,
    A happy CSCO (and MSFT) shareholder :)
  • IOS [cisco.com] isn't exactly an embedded toaster OS.
  • The high-end cisco certifications are based not on a simple paper test, but on a two day demonstration of your knowledge of designing, building and debugging a modern network. There is a 40% to 60% fail rate for first time testers. When you pay your $1000 for the test, they sit you
    in front of $1million worth of equipment and give you a handfull of assignments to complete in 8 hours the first day. There is so much to be
    done you don't have time to look anything up in the documentation except for a few rare commands.

    Companies who rely heavily on their networks will pay twice the market rate for a CCIE badged engineer over one with equivalent work experience. When a CCIE walks in the door, they know everything from cabling to major routing protocols, and not just IP protocols but SNA, appletalk, decnet, IPX, and others.

    I was a paper CNE, I passed after only 2 days of study and one practice install. I spent 6 months preparing for my CCIE, and that almost wasn't
    enough. I have access to a pile of cisco equipment and spent 5 to 20 hours per week working on scenarios. You don't just get one of these by
    reading a few books.

    There are only about 4000 CCIEs in the world right now, its a pretty elite clique. When you get the top cert, you can literally name your price :-)

    the AC
  • This is as good a time as any to debut my Corporate Web site at http://www.kband.com/corporate/corporat e.pl [kband.com].
    I've been recently tracking Cisco [kband.com] , so it's got a very full listing of the 40 acquisitions Cisco has made. The WSJ explicates that the size of the deal is based on the valuation of similar companies that have recently IPO'd, namely Juniper [kband.com], popularly described as a Cisco-killer. Juniper's at $11 bil.
    If anyone wants to discuss Cisco with me in private, please e-mail me [mailto], as I'm working on a book on the company.
  • First Cisco says that sonet is dead, now they are paying 6B for a sonet co.
    It seems that is costing them more to get in the optical game than say Nortel to ge into the data game (Nortel paid about 6.5B to get with Bay.

    What this says is that the competition is heating up. If you are not in the game with a product now, you will lose a lot of mindshare. Obviously, Nortel and Lucent and others soon to be assymilated are working on equivalent equipment.
    For us Lusers, it means that bandwidth is getting cheaper, and thus closer to the home; stay tunned, youwill soon hear about sts1/oc3 interfaces for your puter (inside knowledge? maybe). There are already ATM cards!
  • correction, at least Nortel has an equivalent product on the market; at less bandwidth at the moment but continually increasing (drnd, should i have said this?). Others, i'm sure, are close to releasing something similar if they do not have it already. Cerent's produc upped the ante however.

    cherrs,

  • My cousin (who is a Lead Buyer at Cisco) related to me this little joke about their rapid growth:

    "Cisco can't have any layoffs, they don't even know who is working for them."

    it made me smile, at least. :)

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