Quadrics prepares to shut its doors

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Register is reporting that interconnect maker Quadrics is getting ready to shut down operations as early as June.

This source says that Roweth has been shopping Quadrics around to Hewlett-Packard, Bull, Cray, and Silicon Graphics since last fall, and all of them apparently were not interested in acquiring the company for its QSNet-III variant on 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches. Many of the key engineers at Quadrics had subsequently left to go work for startups, the source said, and he expected Quadrics to be shut down by the end of June.

Another source said that Finmeccanica UK, Quadrics’ parent company, was going through the legal consultation process of making people redundant and that this process would be wrapped up by the end of May. He added that Roweth deserved credit for keeping Quadrics alive for as long as he did, given the harsh economic environment.

In both cases, the sources say that key employees were being moved to another Finmeccanica division to provide ongoing support for the QSNet switches and related technologies used in production supercomputers.

As pointed out in the article, the shut down has been confirmed by Finmeccanica