In an effort to expand its services, Santa Clara based Intel Corporation has decided to purchase another Santa Clara company, Barefoot Networks.
Navin Shenoy, Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Data Center Group at Intel Corporation announced the purchase of Barefoot Networks in a news release. Shenoy says Intel targeted Barefoot Networks because of its ability to serve some of the company’s key customers in the public cloud and datacenter sector.
Barefoot Networks created programmable switches that allow computer networks to be reconfigured via software so they can always provide the best performance even as the needs of the customer change.
“Barefoot Networks’ programmable switches complement our existing Intel Ethernet network interface controllers and silicon photonics interconnect products to deliver Ethernet fabrics that support and scale our Intel Xeon datacenter CPUs,” said William Moss of Intel Corporate Relations.
Headquartered on Patrick Henry Drive, just down the road from Mission College, Barefoot Networks is a small privately held company with fewer than 200 employees according to the company’s LinkedIn profile.
While the actual value of the company is unknown, Tech Crunch reports that Barefoot Networks raised $155.4 million in funding a few years ago from investors that included Tencent Holdings, Alibaba Group, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Lightspeed Ventures.
The terms of the deal between Intel and Barefoot Networks, including the price, were not released. The sale is expected to be done by September of 2019.
So far, Intel has not said what will happen to the Barefoot Networks headquarters or all of the company’s employees, but at least some of them will be brought onto the Intel team.
“Barefoot Networks will add deep expertise in cloud network architectures,” said Shenoy. “Most important, this is one of the most talented and experienced teams in this domain in the industry. We look forward to welcoming Dr. [Craig] Barratt and his team to the Intel family once the transaction closes.”
Barefoot Networks was founded by a number of Silicon Valley veterans. Co-founder Nick McKeown is a Stanford University professor who has developed a number of Silicon Valley startups over the years.
McKeown co-founded Abrizio in the 1990s, which he later sold to PMC-Sierra; Nemo Systems, which he sold to Cisco in 2005; and Nicira Networks, which was sold to VMWare in 2012.
In 2016, Barefoot Networks brought in CEO Dr. Craig Barratt, a former Google executive and a former Stanford University professor.