Ascend streamlines Cascade assets

Wide area network company Ascend has completed its merger with Cascade in two months, including the integration of personnel, products and channels to market.

John Cook, who managed the integration process, including more than 1,000 layoffs, has been appointed sales and marketing director for EMEA at the the company.

?Ascend and Cascade had 900 people worldwide each and now the organisation numbers 1,650 people,? said Cook. ?There was an overlap in administration and some jobs had to go ? one VP of sales in the US was more than enough.?

The routes to market have also been successfully merged, he claimed, around four new business divisions.

The only product to drop from the Ascend portfolio is the AX line, although elements of that will be used as the basis of future products, Cook said.

The company has released a set of distributed applications that will run across the entire range of all four divisions. The Navis Xtend applications consist of six server products for accounting, customer network management, fault tracking, provisioning, a standby server and a report server. Billing facilities are also included.

Although Cook acknowledged that Ascend lagged behind Cisco in the enterprise router area and 3Com in the consumer market, he said that the company was preparing switches and other products to fill that gap.