Cisco’s Buying Spree Includes SpansLogic

Cisco Systems  continued its acquisition spree today by picking up privately-held SpansLogic of Mountain View, Calif.

SpansLogic is a fabless semiconductor company that develops processors that are designed to increase network packet processing speeds. Cisco spokesperson Ron Piovesan said Cisco had been a customer of SpansLogic’s processing technology

Financial terms of the deal were not publicly disclosed; a Cisco spokesperson told internetnews.com that all 14 SpansLogic employees would be moving over to Cisco.

The newly acquired assets will find a place within Cisco’s core networking product line.

“Our immediate intention is to integrate SpansLogic processors into our switching portfolio,” Piovesan said.

The hope is that with the SpansLogic technology in place, Cisco’s switching platforms will be more efficient as Ethernet moves to 10 GbE speeds and beyond. Cisco is currently ranked by research firm Dell’o’ro as the lead vendor in the 10 GbE market  with a 70 percent market share.

The SpansLogic acquisition is the latest in a string of takeovers by Cisco in 2007. A little over a week ago Cisco announced a blockbuster $3.2 billion bid for online meeting vender WebEx. Just a few days before that, Cisco bought file virtualization vendor NeoPath Networks. The week before that, Cisco bought privately held Utah Street Networks, the operator of the social networking site Tribe.net.

In late February, Cisco bought XML processing firm Reactivity for $135 million. Cisco also bought social networking vendor five across in February.