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Jim Barthold
It's hardly chump change, but Cisco's $100 million investment in Liberate Technologies was "a lot less about the money than it was about strengthening the partnership, taking it to the next level, maybe two more levels," says Dave Limp, Liberate's SVP-corporate development.
Limp points to the investment, which buys Cisco a 3.88% stake in the Internet content provider, as "a way to figure out better ways to give your average cable operator, your average satellite operator, your average telco a better end-to-end solution" for delivering such services as IP-based video, data and telephony over high-speed networks.
Oracle is still Liberate's leading investor with about a 34% stake.
Limp says the closer relationship with Cisco will help the companies accelerate standards.
"One of the things that's been rooted into cable systems and other types of systems over time has been the lack of a unifying standard," he says.
CableLabs' DOCSIS effort started to change that paradigm.
"That was totally standards-based," he says. "As we move forward, I think you're going to see us collaborating on even more of these kinds of efforts because, when you can get a standard in place that everybody's talking about, you can get multiple vendor solutions that are better than the end-to-end vertically-integrated solutions."
Limp looks forward to a two-vendor relationship with Cisco.
"Cisco's long-term vision is very similar to Liberate's long-term vision at the macro level, except obviously Liberate is very focused on the appliance side of the business," Limp says.
Cisco, of course, is focused on the Internet Protocol (IP) side of things and will continue to be - with and without Liberate.
"This is not an exclusive," emphasizes Paul Bosco, VP-marketing and affiliations services with Cisco's IP Carrier and Access Group. "What's really happening here is our accelerating move into thin clients, set-tops, game players of all kinds. I don't think this is the last partnership you'll see, but I do think you'll see us move aggressively to continue to complete the solutions that customers are asking us to deploy."
Cisco is also working with Peach Networks, recently acquired by Microsoft, Spyglass "and a whole bunch of other players," says Bosco.
"Cisco is a company that's coming from a PC foundation, so for us to deliver open architectures to this class of devices, it's going to take some non-trivial partnering and investing in the near future."
Limp agrees that Cisco's just a friend, not a lover, although he expects some serious hand-holding when the pair visit customers.
"The issue here is it's not exclusive, although it's highly preferred with Cisco, just like they are preferred with us," Limp says.
"You have to be able to go to others, if necessary. Long term, I'm putting a fairly big bet, as is Cisco, that Liberate and Cisco together are the winner, he adds."
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