At the heart of Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey-based Ascom Timeplex Inc’s lawsuit against Calabasas, California-based Xylan Corp is the allegation that the latter raided 20 key Ascom employees who had access to confidential and proprietary information – by persuading them to move to Xylan – and then incorporated Ascom trade secrets into its products. Xylan’s Omni-Switch is claimed to incorporate Ascom’s trade secret technology, and possibly its PizzaSwitch. Ascom is still checking this claim, but is reasonably certain this is the case. The trade secrets are said to include proprietary Frame Relay technology that forms the basis for Ascom’s Express Routing and Express Switching architecture. Furthermore, the suit claims that Xylan has infringed Ascom’s patent for a Hub for Virtual Local Area Network with Shared Media Access. This establishes a segmented virtual local area network within a larger network, using shared media to form a backbone network. Ascom’s Access Router, Integrated Access Node and Enterprise Router products are all said to incorporate the patented technology. The aggrieved company said that, although development has been hit by the defections to Xylan, it is confident it will get back on track. Steve Kim, Xylan’s founder and president is named in the suit, as are the former Ascom employees, now at Xylan. Ascom is seeking preliminary and permanent injunctions to prevent Xylan from selling the OmniSwitch (and possibly the PizzaSwitch) and to stop Xylan from the alleged use of Ascom’s trade secret technology.
