Xylan Corp, Calabasas, California and the Ascom Timeplex Inc unit of Ascom AG have come to an out-of-court settlement in the lawsuit first filed by the latter in June of last year (CI No 2,700). Ascom had alleged that Xylan raided 20 of its employees by persuading them to move to Xylan, and then applied the Ascom trade secrets that they brought with them, in its own products. The two companies are not giving out the precise details of their settlement, but what is known is that Xylan has been granted a license to Ascom’s Virtual Local Area Network patent – one of those at issue. And Xylan has granted Ascom a limited license to unspecified aspects of its switching technology: this is believed to be in return for Ascom dropping the case against the employees named in its original lawsuit. It is presently unclear exactly what has been settled in the case of another allegation made by Ascom, that Xylan had appropriated technologies that were related to the proprietary Frame Relay technology that lies behind the Ascom Express Routing and Express Switching architectures.
