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.
