NetXen is no more

I've been sitting on bits and pieces of this for a while now, but the company I've been working for the past 3.5 years, NetXen, was officially purchased today.

I guess the story of our acquisition starts a few weeks ago. Our main competitor in the 10 Gigabit Ethernet market, Broadcom, made its intentions clear that they were looking to buy a network fabric company named Emulex. The offer to buy eventually morphed into a hostile takeover.

So what does this have to do with NetXen? Well, Broadcom makes Ethernet cards that compete with ours, and (assuming the takeover goes according to plan) they now have the capability to integrate their product into larger-scale markets by pairing their Ethernet cards with Networking Fabric products from Emulex. Emulex only has one real competitor in its market-space... and that would be QLogic. QLogic sees its only competitor potentially being gobbled up by a corporate giant, and decides to grab its own slice of the pie... NetXen.

NetXen sold to QLogic for roughly $21M... which is kind of sad since our evaluated worth was probably 10 times that just a year ago. But the merger allows us to move on and into larger markets. We've beaten the pants off Broadcom in terms of design wins over the past 3 years, and QLogic leads over Emulex in market share by a healthy margin. All signs say the QLogic / NetXen merger should be a success, but the only way to find out is to wait it out.

What's this mean for me? Almost nothing, sadly. I've been working my butt off after grad school with the hopes of my options paying off, and it looks like all was for naught at this point. I feel like I'm sort of at a cross-roads here. I'm finally ready to walk away from my job if they don't start paying me more in line with what a computer engineer with a MS in EE and almost 7 years of experience is worth.