Agilent Technologies Inc. acquired The Silicon Valley Networking Lab Inc., an independent, third-party test lab for the networking industry based in San Jose, Calif.
Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Founded in 1998, SVNL offers services for performance benchmarking, interoperability, functional and conformance testing. The company’s solutions are targeted at networking-equipment manufacturers, communications service providers and system integrators.
“With the addition of The Silicon Valley Networking Lab, Agilent plans to build the leading independent test and analysis center and to offer a substantially increased range of services to current and future customers in the networking and communications industry,” said LuAnn Piccard, general manager of Agilent’s Communications Solutions Services Division, which SVNL joined. “As a result of this acquisition, Agilent will offer a new level of testing and analysis competency, expertise and range of testing services not now available to the industry.
“We believe the acquisition fulfills an important part of our overall value proposition,” said Piccard. “We could test the pieces, but until we can show that they are interoperable, we haven’t truly solved the problem for our customers.”
Steve Bell, founder, president and chief executive officer of SVNL, said the company will continue to maintain a level of independence to preserve its third-party objectivity.
Bell said he believes networking equipment companies want to outsource much of the testing they require, but there doesn’t exist an operation large enough to fulfill that need. Bell said Agilent will give SVNL the financial and technical resources to grow quickly to the scale it needs to be able to provide the type of outsourced testing networking companies want.
“SVNL has filled a major niche for test services,” said Bell. “There is a critical and unfilled need for high-quality, outsourced test services. As a result, SVNL was able to build a client base of more than 50 key networking OEMS, systems integrators and industry groups in a very short time span.
“With Agilent’s engineering and financial resources behind us, we are ready to build the kind of large-scale operation and set of services that this dynamic networking industry demands.”
In addition to performing testing and analysis for a variety of companies, SVNL also has done testing for various industry groups. Last fall, SVNL was awarded a contract for inteoperability certification testing by the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance (WECA).
