Nortel Pays 99.5 Million Dollars in Cash for Tasman Networks

Nortel Networks Corp. has made a first step into enhancing its router line by announcing the intention to buy Tasman Networks, a private producer of high-performance wide-area IP routers.

Nortel will pay $99.5 million in cash. Announced Tuesday, the acquisition will offer full routing and multicast services to small and medium-sized office deployments.

Nortel Networks Corporation, formerly known as Northern Telecom Limited and now familiarly known simply as Nortel, is a telecommunications equipment manufacturer headquartered in Canada. The Nortel complex is owned by the media giant Rogers Communications. The objective of the transaction is Tasman Networks' routers production facilities. A router is a network device that forwards packets from one network to another. Based on internal routing tables, routers read each incoming packet and decide how to forward it. Routers are used to separate local area networks (LANs) into subnetworks in order to balance traffic within workgroups and to filter traffic for security purposes and policy management. Routers are also used at the edge of the network to connect to remote offices or to an ISP for Internet access.
"We anticipate that the Tasman products will complement our enterprise infrastructure solutions and further our ability to provide seamless, feature-rich networks that support critical real-time applications--including voice, video, and streaming multimedia applications," said Nortel's Steve Slattery in a statement. Slattery is president of Nortel's Enterprise Solutions and Packet Networks unit.

The Tasman products, planned to be marketed under the aegis of Nortel's Secure Router line, will augment Nortel's convergence technologies for data and IP multimedia customers. Nortel pointed out that the Tasman products are capable of simultaneously running various services including voice, VPN, firewall, and quality of service--all with wire-speed performance.

Nortel is one of the companies to have deployed more than 50 million enterprise telephony lines in addition to 50 million Ethernet ports, which demonstrates the company's leader position in delivering converged network solutions.