Company Performance Metrics
Carl Russo: president and CEOPast Role: Cisco, vice president of optical strategy and group vice president of optical networking
Cerent Corporation was an optical equipment maker based in Petaluma, California. It was founded in 1997 as Fiberlane Communications with three divisions: Systems in Petaluma, Chip Design in Redwood City, California and Network Management Systems in Burnaby, British Columbia. In early 1998 the company split into two companies with the Petaluma
branch becoming Cerent and the Burnaby and Redwood City branches becoming Siara Networks.
Cerent's first product was the Cerent 454. In August 1999, the company was sold to Cisco Systems for $7.2 billion and became the foundation of Cisco's Optical Transport Business Unit. The Cerent 454 was rebranded the Cisco 15454 and became the fastest product (at that time) to hit the $1B annual sales rate by selling $250 million in its second quarter as a Cisco business unit.
In November 1999 Redback bought Siara Systems for $4.3 billion.
