The two founders of NuSpeed Internet Systems, which Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) bought two and a half years ago for $450 million, are leaving Cisco at the end of the month, Byte and Switch has learned.
On Monday, Mark Cree, general manager of what is now Cisco's storage router business unit, sent an email to the group announcing that he and Clint Jurgens, its business development manager, have given Cisco their two weeks' notice and will resign their positions effective Jan. 31. Byte and Switch obtained a copy of the email (see below for the full text).
Neither Cree nor Jurgens responded to email or phone messages. A Cisco spokesman says the company's policy is to "never comment on personnel issues."
Cree and Jurgens founded NuSpeed in December 1999. The company, based in the Minneapolis suburb of Maple Grove, was developing a router for sending Fibre Channel storage traffic over IP networks. Just seven months later, in July 2000, Cisco announced its intent to acquire the company for $450 million in stock -- and it's not clear whether NuSpeed even had an actual shipping product at the time (see Cisco to Acquire NuSpeed Internet).
While Cree didn't provide an explicit reason for their departure in his email message, he wrote: "It has been disappointing that the sales and marketing forces of Cisco have not matched our market development success with equal success in generating revenue." Cree did not indicate what, if anything, he and Jurgens may be doing next.
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