Cisco Systems will acquire metro Ethernet chipmaker Greenfield Networks, the companies announced today. Neither company disclosed terms of the deal.

Six-year-old Greenfield has 60 employees in Sunnyvale, Calif., and Bangalore, India. Its Packetry products offer packet processing at Layers 2, 3 and 4, with support for IPv6, multi-field traffic classification, packet prioritization and bandwidth guarantees. The products are designed for use in multiprotocol label switching applications, stacked virtual local access networks, Layer 2 and 3 virtual private networks and IP tunneling.

A $21.5 million C round two years ago brought Greenfield’s total funding to $48 million. A year ago, Greenfield named a Cisco alumnus as its chief executive officer; Bill Rossi was formerly vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Wireless Networking unit.

The acquisition will help Cisco bring certain carrier-class features of metro Ethernet gear to market more quickly, Cisco said.

Cisco expects the acquisition to close this quarter, at which point Greenfield will become part of Cisco’s Ethernet and Wireless Technology group.

Related Articles

The winds of change

Cisco inches Ethernet closer to access

Cisco introduces telepresence system