Cisco to acquire CoreOptics

Cisco (NasdaqGS: CSCO) is on the acquisition trail again. This time the networking giant is shelling out $99 million to acquire optical digital signal processing (DSP) vendor CoreOptics. With various incumbent service providers preparing to transition to 100 Gbps networking to support the growth of wireless and wireline-based IP traffic, Cisco wants a piece of the action.

To help service providers make the transition from 10 to 40 and 100 Gbps on their respective backbone networks, service providers will require technology that's more capex efficient than what's available today. What Cisco gets out of the deal is access to CoreOptics' knowledge of two emerging optical technology approaches: Electronic Distortion Equalization (EDE) and Maximum Likelihood Sequence Estimation (MLSE). Among its many benefits EDE and MLSE eliminate the need for a service provider to deploy Dispersion Compensation Modules (DCMs) and Dual-Stage amplifiers.

When Cisco completes the acquisition, CoreOptics employees will be integrated into Cisco's Service Provider Technology and work with Cisco's established optical engineering teams in Monza, Italy, Bangalore, India, and Richardson, Texas.

For more:
- see the release here

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