Cascade Communications Corporation was a manufacturer of communications equipment based in Westford, Massachusetts.
History
Cascade was founded by Gururaj Deshpande in 1990, and was led by CEO Dan Smith, VP of Sales Mike Champa and CFO Paul Blondin.[1]
Cascade made a compact Frame Relay and Asynchronous Transfer Mode communication switches that were sold to telecommunication service providers worldwide. Frame Relay service was the primary data service used by companies in the mid-1990s to create secure internal communication networks between separate sites, and Cascade's equipment carried an estimated 70% of the world's Internet traffic during this time.
Their most important direct competitor was StrataCom, which was acquired by Cisco Systems in 1996 for US $4B.[2]
In 1997, Ascend Communications acquired Cascade Communications for US $3.7 Billion,[1]