Broadcom drops their Emulex takeover bid

http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSTRE5683PD20090709

If you recall what I wrote when NetXen got bought, it probably had something to do with Broadcom's positioning to buy/take over a network fabric company called Emulex. QLogic bought NetXen as a reaction in order to stay competitive with a potentially large competitor if Broadcom were to acquire Emulex.

It looks like QLogic emerges from the fray as the only company able to service 10Gig NIC as well as FCoE and iSCSI needs.

A Nice Raise

Since I was displeased with my offer to stay on at QLogic, I had a little chat with Govind, the founder and former CEO of NetXen. You see, I had a manager back when I was hired 3.5 years ago. He was the only person in the company, apparently, with any knowledge of my compensation. He gave up his management position roughly 2 years ago, and Erik (my friend from grad school) became my manager. I explained this to Govind, as well as the fact that my salary was still less than an offer I received over 4 years ago from Intel to work in a cheaper area.

So from there, Govind had to talk with some of the higher-ups in QLogic. Yesterday, QLogic HR got back to me with the terms of a revised offer made based on the resume I had outlined for them. The change was a ~21% raise in base salary. This certainly couldn't come at a better time because I'm recovering from paying double rent from the month we moved into the current apartment, puppy expenses and the check I had to write to Uncle Sam at tax time.

The HR lady explained to me that they don't normally give raises of that magnitude, but mine was sort of an extreme situation. Govind came by yesterday to tell me I should have never let things get that far out of hand, and admit that mistakes had been made on the management side as well. In the end, I'm happy with my compensation... so I suppose I'll put away my resume.

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.