Marconi, Fore Systems

FORE Systems was a leader in internet switching equipment based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The company is now part of Ericsson. more...

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The company established a leading position in the market for Asynchronous Transfer Mode switching equipment. FORE created an advanced memory-based ATM switch that captured a strong portion of the ATM market. Other technologies include Internet Protocol, Gigabit Ethernet and Firewall switching.

FORE was created by several Carnegie Mellon University professors in a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania suburb. The name FORE was an acronym of the founders’ first names: Francois Bitz, Onat Menzilcioglu, Robert Sansom, and Eric Cooper.

It was acquired by London based GEC (now Marconi Corporation plc) to complement its Marconi Communications business and to increase its presence in North America, the world’s largest telecoms market.

GEC acquired FORE near the peak of the dot-com bubble. The £2.8bn price tag for FORE Systems (and the £1.3n spent on Reltec a month earlier) took a heavy toll on Marconi following the “burst of the dot-com bubble” in 2000/2001. In July 2001 Marconi plc suffered a 54% drop in its share price following suspension of trading of its shares, a profits warning and redundancies. The company survived following a relaunch as Marconi Corporation plc in a debt-for-equity swap whereby the firm’s creditors received 99.5% of the new company’s shares.

In 2006, Ericsson purchased most of Marconi, including the part that used to be FORE Systems.

Read more at Wikipedia.org