Procket Gets Unplugged

Well, it's official - Procket is unplugged and sold to Cisco. At $89M, where they invested $300M, and Cisco was an early investor, I'd say they got a bargain. But will they use the technology?

According to one Cisco insider I spoke with he think the technology isn't the big thing. "I think we regard it as a bargain: purchase 50 high end engineers, fluent in router design, ASIC design and layout, board design, SW, etc. for 80 million. Not a bad deal". As to the tech, he says simply "We are fragmented enough as it is". So they'll find a use for it somewhere but it isn't urgent.

One of the things that Cisco is moving towards is more spin-in investments, where a Tiger team is set aside as a startup, puts together a product, and then is reabsorbed back into Cisco. Makes sense for a company as big and bureaucratic as Cisco now is - and is a very low-risk way for employees to try something new.

IBM faced a similar crisis, and established the Boca Raton group who created the IBM PC. We'll see if Cisco can achieve something as industry-changing using this technique, or if they're vision is too parochial to provide anything more than busywork for their M&A staff.