Kalpana
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The Sunnyvale startup that shipped the first multiport Ethernet switch in 1990 and, four years later, became one of Cisco's most consequential acquisitions.
Founded in the late 1980s by Vinod Bhardwaj and Larry Blair and named after Bhardwaj's wife (Kalpana means 'imagination' in Sanskrit), the company introduced the seven-port EtherSwitch in 1990, inventing Ethernet switching and with it the modern LAN: dedicated bandwidth per port instead of a shared, collision-prone medium. It followed with full-duplex Ethernet and EtherChannel link aggregation. Cisco completed its acquisition on December 7, 1994, for about 200 million dollars, and Kalpana's switching lineage runs straight into this site's Cisco and Riverstone histories, where a Kalpana engineer later co-founded Yago. Sources put the founding anywhere from 1987 to 1990; the 1990 first-switch milestone is the fixed point.
Also known as: EtherSwitch