Cisco Snaps Up MPLS Smarts

Cisco Systems on Thursday said it planned to acquire Parc Technologies Ltd. of London, a privately held developer of routing software designed to speed wide-area network traffic. In a statement, Cisco said it will pay $9 million in cash for all the outstanding shares of Parc not already owned by Cisco. Cisco, an investor in Parc, had previously owned 10 percent of the company, according to a Cisco spokesperson. Cisco and Parc had previously teamed to build software that helped provide quality-of-service features for multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) networks.

According to Cisco, Parc's software and algorithms will be incorporated into Cisco's high-end router offerings for service provider customers.

"Cisco and Parc together have [already] created a market leading MPLS traffic engineering planning and optimization application," said Cliff Meltzer, senior vice president for Cisco's network management technology group, in a statement. "We are excited to welcome Parc's highly specialized team of algorithm developers and software engineers to Cisco."

According to Parc, the company was founded in 1999 based on technologies developed at the Imperial College in the University of London. According to the company, it has developed a specialized programming language that helps it tackle complex networking problems, such as WAN traffic engineering or airline scheduling.