By Dan Jones in Palm Springs and Jo Maitland in New York
Intel Corp has added more flesh to the bones of the networking strategy it announced on Wednesday, giving more details of its product line and partners. Intel says that it is buying the Mountain View, California-based NetBoost Corp for its development tools and attendant silicon. NetBoost provides an application programming interface and software libraries that enable ISVs and communications equipment suppliers to build policy-oriented network services such as firewalls, intrusion detection, Virtual Private Network gateways and load balancing and other applications. The company also produces a set of accelerator chips that complement its software.
NetBoost completed a first-round of financing in August 1997 of $4.6m from four venture capital funds including Bay Partners, Charter Ventures, Crosspoint Venture Partners, and Hambrecht & Quist. A year later, Intel joined the party in a second round of funding worth $10.5m that also included Texas Instruments and further contributions from the previous investors.
Meantime, Intel says that six networking companies: Cisco, Broadband Access Systems, Cabletron, CAG, Newbridge Networks and Omneon Video Networks are supporting Intel’s Internet Exchange (IX) Architecture and will build products based around it. Intel has spent two years and $2bn developing the architecture, using technology acquired from Level One Communications and SoftCom. As well as the flagship network processor it announced yesterday – the 100MIPS IXP1200, which comes originally from the Digital Equipment Corp Digital Semiconductor side of its business – Intel announced 12 co-processors and support chips. These include a 6400 Broadband Engine chip, a Gigabit Ethernet PHY chip (physical layer) and a media access control (MAC) chip. All of these products will be marketed under the Level One Communications brand.
