Lucent Technologies Inc. last month named John Meyer, former president of information technology management services at Electronic Data Systems Corp. (EDS), president of Lucent Worldwide Services, effective April 1.Meyer replaces John Heindel, who is leaving Lucent to pursue other opportunities, the company said. Meyer will direct Lucent’s professional services business, which generated US$2.7 billion in revenue in fiscal 2002. Deployment and professional services for the world’s largest service providers represents a US$44 billion addressable market and an increasingly strategic growth area for Lucent as it pares its product line to reduce cost during the telecom slump. Meyer will report to Robert Holder, Lucent’s COO. He was with EDS for 20 years.
Allegro closes its doors
The three-year-old telecom slump has claimed yet another young company. Edge router startup Allegro Networks Inc. is closing its doors after laying off 89 per cent of its staff in March. Allegro could not generate revenue or additional funding to keep afloat, said Dave Ginsburg, Allegro vice-president of marketing. Allegro’s eight remaining employees will concentrate on selling off assets and intellectual property, Ginsburg said. Allegro is looking to place groups of engineers and intellectual property in some of the larger companies as groups, Ginsburg added. The company’s operations in India will most likely transfer intact to another company, he said. Allegro was founded in January 2000. At its peak, the company employed 185 people. It was headed by Chief Executive Dave House, former CEO of Bay Networks Inc. and president of Nortel Networks Corp.
InfiniBand startups merge
InfiniBand startups InfiniSwitch Corp. and Lane 15 Software Inc. said last month that they will merge. The new company will be called InfiniSwitch. It will focus on products for clustering servers in data centres to improve performance and efficiency. The companies join a handful of others investing in next-generation bus technology. Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Corp. and other companies have decided that rather than natively enabling their servers with the technology, they will provide switches like those from InfiniSwitch that bridge and route InfiniBand to gigabit Ethernet networks. The combined InfiniSwitch will have as many as 80 employees.