Cisco Acquires P-Cube for IP Service Control Platform

Cisco Systems agreed to acquire P-Cube, a developer of IP service control platforms, for approximately $200 million in cash and options. P-Cube's Service Control Platform offers a stateful deep packet inspection capability that provides application-awareness while quality of service is maintained through real-time application control. The platform enables service providers to control and manage advanced IP services, such as interactive gaming, Video-on-Demand, and Peer-to-Peer.



P-Cube's Service Control Platform is both application and subscriber-aware. The company said its that unlike other solutions, its platform fully reconstructs flows and the Layer 7 state of each individual application flow -- instead of processing packets as individual events. By maintaining state information, P-Cube identifies applications that employ dynamically assigned port numbers, tracks applications that involve multiple inter-related or spawned flows commonly found in VoIP and multimedia streaming protocols, and applies policy rules as part of controlling the admission policies or session characteristics of a data flow.



Upon close of the acquisition, the P-Cube team will report to Pankaj Patel, vice president and general manager of Cisco's Broadband Edge and Midrange Routing Business Unit. http://www.cisco.comhttp://www.p-cube.com

• P-Cube, a start-up based in Sunnyvale , California with R&D in Israel, was founded in 1999 and has 118 employees.

P-Cube is led by Yuval Shahar, who previously co-founded PentaCom (acquired by Cisco Systems) and developed one of the world's first web appliances, which led to the creation of Infogear Inc. (also acquired by Cisco Systems). Its technical team is headed by Michael Ben-nun, who previously served as General Manager and Director of the Network Access Division of Rockwell Semiconductor Systems Israel (Conexant).

In May 2004, P-Cube announced that Plala Networks, a subsidiary of NTT East, had deployed its Service Control Platform and Engage solution throughout its nationwide backbone network to reduce network congestion that is caused by Internet user-originated traffic, such as peer-to-peer (P2P). The contract has been delivered through Mitsubishi Corporation providing channel distribution, integration and support services in strategic partnership with P-Cube. P-Cube's Service Control Engine is deployed in strategic POPs in the Plala network. The company said its customer base also includes SingTel, Telenor, @NetHome, KT, 3 Italy (Hutchison), and Interoute, among others.