Brigden quits to join Cisco

Newbridge Networks has suffered another blow following the shock departure of its marketing manager, Steve Brigden, who resigned after the vendor failed to capitalise on UB Networks' business.

Brigden's resignation coincides with an announcement, made on 26 January concerning the enterprise market that the Canadian vendor will resell 3Com products, including the SuperStack range, and 3Com will resell Newbridge's products, including MainStreetXpress. Newbridge customers will now migrate towards 3Com products for Lan technology.

A source said ex-UB employee Brigden, who resigned to join Cisco as an account manager, had left for personal and political reasons. 'Steve felt that Newbridge had made a conscious effort to pull out of the Lan area and was unimpressed with the enterprise strategy.'

Newbridge acquired the company in January 1997, but by December had announced a huge downturn in sales on UB products and a number of redundancies.

The source commented: 'Newbridge had bought UB to get into the Lan market, but there is now going to be a de-emphasis.'

However, Andy Williams, director of Enterprise Solutions at Newbridge, said: 'I do not think we have failed on the UB acquisition and the company has done a good job in terms of integration.' He added: 'The Lan product differed in price and other large vendors were having a lot of trouble selling them.'

The vendor will continue to focus on the Wan campus market with the Vivid product range.