San Jose, California-based Cisco Systems Inc has lived up to its recent promise of keeping up its recent hot pace on the acquisition trail – albeit in a minor key – by taking a modest 4.4% stake in Objective Systems Integrators Inc of Folsom, California. The announcement coincides with Objective Systems’ initial public offering last week of four million shares of common stock, as a result of which the company now has 29.7m shares outstanding (CI No 2,806). Cisco is acquiring 1.3m shares of Objective Systems common stock at the initial public offering price of $19 per share. Objective Systems develops, markets and supports object-oriented, client-server software systems for network operations support and management. It is best known for its NetExpert family of graphical user interface-based development tools and management applications, which are designed to enable network analysts and engineers – rather than software programmers – to create new network operations support and management applications or modify existing applications to support new services. According to Jon Shantz, vice-president of service provider markets at Cisco, the two companies plan to co-develop network management applications for Cisco internetworking technology, based on NetExpert, which will enable service providers to deploy new and enhanced internetworking services over their networks. By working with Objective Systems, Shantz said, we’ll increase the availability of key internetworking technology to carriers, cable companies and other service providers and the availability of enhanced internetworking services to users worldwide.
