USR gets star buy in Scorpio

US Robotics (USR) is planning to buy Israeli ATM switching vendor Scorpio Communications in a stock swap deal worth between $50 million and $100 million.

The US firm said last week it had signed a preliminary agreement to buy Scorpio and expected the transaction to close within three months. The deal is subject to the approval of Scorpio's shareholders but other terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Sources say Scorpio will remain in Israel as a wholly owned subsidiary of USR. It is a specialist in scalable, fault-tolerant ATM switches and has two products, the Stinger One and the Stinger Five.

Bob Bowden, product marketing manager at USR, said the Scorpio range is likely to be rebranded in the UK because the products of three other USR acquisitions in the last year - ISDN Systems, Palm Computing and Amberwave - have been sold in the UK as USR peripherals.