Chapter 12 - Networking: Market Order: LANs 1983-1986
12.17 Interlan
Interlan met with a number of companies to discuss possible acquisition or merger. For example Ralph Ungermann remembers:
I had looked at Interlan very, very closely. Alex must have started us into that, but we had many meetings in Boston. I already knew the company. We had already hired a couple of guys out of there, and I had already visited it a couple, three times, and we had talked about doing some things together. They were an OEM company. We’re an end-user company. I looked hard at it. We decided that we needed to focus, and so we chose not to get involved with an OEM company, but it would have filled out our product line some. So I was very well aware of what was going on, whom the bidders were.
Severino recalls the process and conclusion:
Frankly a lot of companies came to the door to look around. Not to look around but just, raised their hands and said: ‘We’re interested in that kind of thing.’ But the one that looked the most acceptable to us and clearly the one that had the capitalization position that was going to allow us to get the price we wanted was Micom. Micom’s capitalization at the time was like $700 million. Micom also was facing the same kind of problems in data PBXs that we saw in dealing with DEC. DEC was taking more and more of their own networks. So we worked the issues with Micom. They were very aggressive. They wanted to do the deal, and came quickly to a conclusion.