Cisco to close down Invicta storage business

The newly arrived Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins announced that Technicolor SA will pay $600 Million to acquire Cisco’s set-top box & connected home business, a business that Chambers acquired 10 years ago in a $6.9 Billion acquisition of Scientific-Atlantic.

The company said it wants to focus on more critical technologies. It didn’t help that last year Cisco pulled Invicta shipments owing to quality control issues.

The deal will result in Technicolor becoming the No. 2 company worldwide in what is called “customer premises equipment” – phone gear, cable and satellite TV set-top boxes, routers and switches, and home monitoring/management devices – with total sales of roughly $3.3 billion and a 15% market share, vs the 25% share of the business that will be controlled by U.S. network gear maker Arris Group and British set-box maker Pace, when they complete a merger.

“Cisco is prioritizing the elements of our portfolio to drive the most value for our customers both now and in the future, and today, we are announcing the End of Life (EoL) for the Invicta Appliance and Scaling System products”.

“Cisco maintains a leadership position in the data center market, with high demand and growing market share”.

Said Robbins, “This is a win for us, a win for Technicolor, and a win for our customers, partners and employees”.

The 2013 Whiptail acquisition was designed to integrate flash storage into Cisco’s United Computing System data centre platform, and was aimed at heating up the flash competition with rivals such as NetApp and EMC.

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Chuck Robbins is now officially the chief executive of networking giant Cisco Systems, replacing longtime boss John Chambers.

Hilton Romanski, Cisco’s senior vice president and chief strategy officer, will join Technicolor’s board of directors after the deal finalizes, sometime in Q4 2015 or Q1 2016. In a blog post last week he mentioned how Cisco was preparing for the “next chapter”.