Lucent Technologies Inc, which of late has been getting closer to Bay Networks Inc, swallowed privately held Agile Networks Inc yesterday on undisclosed terms. Agile, a 60-person firm based in Boxborough, Massachusetts, was founded by Bill Siefert in late 1991 to address the convergence of voice and data networks into multimedia networks. Siefert was also the co-founder of Wellfleet Communications in 1986, along with Paul Severino, now the chairman of Bay Networks. Agile has been making waves recently with its intelligent data switching technology that supports both Ethernet and Asynchronous Transfer Mode networks, and for its VLAN virtual local area networking software that allows companies to automatically add or move employees on their premise-based networks. Although Lucent admits to some overlap between Agile’s products and the Bay Networks technology it already offers (CI No 2,956), Lucent’s vice president of multimedia systems claimed that any such overlap was minimal in terms of the full scope of Agile’s technology, which would fit alongside both Bay Network products and Lucent’s own core switching products, developed in-house. Agile’s backbone switches and closet switching products will be added to the Lucent portfolio immediately, while the switching technology will be integrated with Bay’s routing software in the longer term. Agile’s VLAN software will be deployed across the Lucent range along with Agile’s integrated network management capabilities for viewing and managing mixed networks of voice, data and multimedia.
