Procket Deal Official, One Day After Chambers Explained Why They Didn't Need It
from the sleight-of-speech dept
A week ago we wrote about the rumored deal that Cisco had bought massively overhyped router startup Procket for $80 million. All week long, no announcement came, and rumors started flying that there was no deal, or that others were trying to top the deal. Yesterday, there was even more speculation that there was no deal when Cisco CEO John Chambers claimed they didn’t need any additional routing products or technology, though he snuck in one important caveat: saying the opportunity to acquire talented engineers might make an acquisition worthwhile. Basically, this was his way of spinning the Procket acquisition in a way that didn’t make it looks like Cisco’s own new router technology was a complete dud. Today, they made it official. Cisco has acquired the company that raised approximately $300 million and was valued at $1.55 billion for a whopping $89 million… for the engineers, of course. Update: Procket founder Tony Li gives his thoughts in an interview where he says the price is a steal, but buying Procket is definitely going to upset Cisco engineers, who will feel it’s a sign that they didn’t do a very good job on the CRS-1 router (though, he also thinks Cisco “missed the market” with the CRS-1).
