Officials at Agilent Technologies announced Thursday night
the buyout of a switch “fabric” silicon designer to boost its InfiniBand
switches.
The buy brings instant expertise to the Agilent fold, something the company
lost last year with the release of
4,000 workers in the wake of the dot bomb era.
RedSwitch brings 80 employees back into Agilent, though officials say
RedSwitch employees will continue to work from their headquarters in
Milpitas, Calif., before moving into Agilent offices.
Agilent executives expect to immediately see efficiencies as a result of
the merger; the company is an engineering and manufacturing outfit for
network testing equipment and storage networks, while RedSwitch provides
switch design expertise and management.
Agilent has always maintained strong ties with RedSwitch; in fact, Agilent
had already owned 74 percent of the company prior to yesterday. Officials
wouldn’t release the financial particulars of the deal, saying only that
all outstanding shares had been purchased.
Mark Alden, an Agilent spokesperson, said the efficiencies created will be
a benefit to the company and its customers alike.
“Although we were majority owners, our two companies operated
independently,” he said. “We worked together on a lot of projects; they
did most of the front-end design and on the back end we did the layout and
manufacturing. Having RedSwitch is going to allow for closer interaction.”
RedSwitch’s expertise in fabric switching is elemental to development of
InifiBand servers for Agilent. InfiniBand is a networking technology used
storage area networks to accommodate the increasing amount of information
passing through a server. It frees the server from processing I/O functions
with incoming and outgoing data traffic in addition to other server
functions — for example, an e-commerce server collecting and analyzing
customer information
The merger is expected to close by the end of November.
