Sam Attisha, Cox Communications Inc.’s new regional manager for Orange County, has laid out his top priorities in overseeing one of the company’s most important markets.
“We’re making sure that we’re constantly investing in the amount of resources we need, not only for infrastructure but also on our employees, products and services in the home,” Attisha told the Business Journal during a recent equipment demo at a Cox Solution Store in the Woodbury neighborhood of Irvine.
The Atlanta-based company has California operations that extend from the U.S.-Mexico border to Santa Barbara, but OC has been the primary driver since it doesn’t serve a majority of Los Angeles.
“This is an amazing market for us,” said the El Cajon native, who splits his time between the company’s OC headquarters in Lake Forest and offices in San Diego. “We’ve been committed to it for a very long time.”
Cox employs 564 locally and 4,100 throughout the state.
Attisha is overseeing a major expansion of fiber optics networking in OC, the next-generation connectivity standard that has proved more challenging than expected for companies that are starting on it from scratch, including Google Inc., which recently disclosed that Irvine has been selected for the service.
“We’re in a very competitive environment,” he said, but “we’ve been growing for years here in California, and I don’t see that stopping.”
Attisha had been serving as interim senior vice president and regional manager since July 2015 while maintaining his role as vice president of business development and public affairs for California before he took over the leadership position permanently.
Bite of the Apple
A unit of Newport Beach-based Acacia Research Corp. won a rare patent infringement lawsuit against consumer electronics giant Apple Inc.
A jury in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas ruled that certain patents related to wireless equipment technology were valid and infringed upon by the Cupertino-based company, awarding $22.1 million in damages.
The patents held by Cellular Communications Equipment GmbH were part of a portfolio that originated from Finland-based Nokia Siemens Networks and Nokia Solutions and Networks.
Acacia has struggled to find its stride in the last year or so, as licensing patents and winning infringement claims has become much more difficult than only a few years ago, when monetizing patents became a common strategy for hordes of technology companies to generate revenue from primarily legacy technologies.
The company, whose market value fell 29% in the last year to about $332 million, is still looking to fill the chief executive position after the December resignation of Matthew Vella.
Acacia last month announced it will make two convertible $10 million loans to Newport Beach-based startup Veritone Inc. that could hit $50 million under certain benchmarks.
The deal also included an equity stake in the audio and video search analytics provider, signaling a new strategy for Acacia.
Netlist IPO
Irvine-based storage equipment maker Netlist Inc. raised $9.3 million last week in a public offering of common stock valued at $1.25 per share.
The sale of 8 million shares generated about $6 million less than the company expected when it announced the transaction on Sept. 8. Proceeds from the offering, which included an option for underwriters B. Riley & Co. LLC, Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC and The Benchmark Co. to acquire an additional 1.2 million shares, will be used to accelerate its patent monetization strategy, commercialize its HybriDIMM product line, and for general corporate purposes.
The offering follows a cash infusion for Netlist earlier this year.
The Business Journal in February reported that Netlist would receive $23 million from South Korea-based Samsung Electronics Co. and have access to thousands of patents from the world’s largest electronics company as part of a joint venture to co-develop a product combining Netlist’s HyperVault offering with Samsung’s DRAM and NAND memory technology.
