Intel buys quietly into gigabit Ethernet

NEWS Without making an official announcement Intel has bought its way deeper into the networking market. The company decided to take over gigabit Ethernet vendor, XLNT, rather than pouring more venture capital into the switch maker. A spokesperson for the company said: "We're trying to build up our network business so that we can offer end to end solutions. XLNT fills one of the holes." The takeover price was not disclosed. John Armstrong, analyst at Dataquest, said the acquisition makes sense for Intel. "They already have some solutions and the technology they have acquired from XLNT is fairly complementary," he said. Armstrong described XLNT as one of the best kept secrets in the industry: "They have focused on fault tolerant architecture which resonated with some people, but the company is fairly low key." The Intel spokesperson echoed Armstrong's comments: "We're in the process of integrating the companies. XLNT will still be a design centre for high-bandwidth server connectivity." The spokesperson said that Intel sees opportunity in the gigabit Ethernet market. "Like most everyone else, we see gigabit as the next generation technology for server connectivity, though it probably won't reach the desktop. We're aiming at small to medium-sized enterprise customers for which we plan to provide with end to end solutions." She added that Intel was not trying to be secretive by not announcing the acquisition. "It's a very small company so we didn't feel we needed to announce the acquisition publicly. To us, there was not really anything to announce - basically, we just bought 50 engineers."