Alteon WebSystems, originally known as Alteon Networks, is a division of

Radware Radware Inc. is an American provider of cybersecurity and application delivery products for physical, cloud and software-defined data centers. Radware's corporate headquarters are located in Mahwah, New Jersey. The company also has offices in Eur ...

that produces

application delivery controller An application delivery controller (ADC) is a computer network device in a datacenter, often part of an application delivery network (ADN), that helps perform common tasks, such as those done by web accelerators to remove load from the web servers ...

s. Alteon was acquired by

Nortel Networks Nortel Networks Corporation (Nortel), formerly Northern Telecom Limited, was a Canadian multinational telecommunications and data networking equipment manufacturer headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. It was founded in Montreal, Quebec, ...

on October 4, 2000. On February 22, 2009 Nortel Networks sold the Alteon application switching line to

History

Alteon Networks was founded in 1996 by Mark Bryers, John Hayes, Ted Schroeder and Wayne Hathaway. Initial

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which ha ...

investors were

Matrix Partners Matrix Partners is a US-based private equity investment firm focusing on venture capital investments. The firm invests in seed and early-stage companies in the United States and India, particularly in the software, communications, semiconducto ...

and

Sutter Hill Ventures Sutter Hill Ventures is an American private equity firm focused on venture capital investments in technology-based start-up companies. Founded in 1964, Sutter Hill is one of the oldest venture capital firms still in operation. Based in Palo Alto ...

. Dominic Orr became chief executive in October 1996. Alteon introduced innovative products such as the ACEswitch 180, which was the first

network switch A network switch (also called switching hub, bridging hub, and, by the IEEE, MAC bridge) is networking hardware that connects devices on a computer network by using packet switching to receive and forward data to the destination device. A netw ...

to deliver

Ethernet Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...

with selectable speed, 10/100 or 1000

Mbit/s In telecommunications, data-transfer rate is the average number of bits (bitrate), characters or symbols (baudrate), or data blocks per unit time passing through a communication link in a data-transmission system. Common data rate units are multi ...

, on every port via

autonegotiation Autonegotiation is a signaling mechanism and procedure used by Ethernet over twisted pair by which two connected devices choose common transmission parameters, such as speed, duplex mode, and flow control. In this process, the connected devices ...

. Their ACEdirector Layer 4-7 switch was designed as an integrated services front-end and server

load balancer In computing, load balancing is the process of distributing a set of tasks over a set of resources (computing units), with the aim of making their overall processing more efficient. Load balancing can optimize the response time and avoid unevenl ...

. They also introduced Jumbo Frames (up to 9,000 bytes) with their ACEnic adapters, and supported by their switches. In addition to server switches, Alteon produced the first

network interface controller A network interface controller (NIC, also known as a network interface card, network adapter, LAN adapter or physical network interface, and by similar terms) is a computer hardware component that connects a computer to a computer network. Ear ...

(NIC) in 1997 that used

Gigabit Ethernet In computer networking, Gigabit Ethernet (GbE or 1 GigE) is the term applied to transmitting Ethernet frames at a rate of a gigabit per second. The most popular variant, 1000BASE-T, is defined by the IEEE 802.3ab standard. It came into use i ...

(demonstrated at the Networld + Interop trade show in September 1996). Alteon's third generation Gigabit Ethernet NIC (code named "Tigon") became the basis for

Broadcom Broadcom Inc. is an American designer, developer, manufacturer and global supplier of a wide range of semiconductor and infrastructure software products. Broadcom's product offerings serve the data center, networking, software, broadband, wirel ...

's family of Ethernet controllers (series BCM570x) and has shipped over 60 million copies. It was used in low-cost adapters from vendors such as

3Com 3Com Corporation was an American digital electronics manufacturer best known for its computer network products. The company was co-founded in 1979 by Robert Metcalfe, Howard Charney and others. Bill Krause joined as President in 1981. Metcalfe ex ...

. In July 2000,

announced it was buying Alteon for

US$ The United States dollar (symbol: $; code: USD; also abbreviated US$ or U.S. Dollar, to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies; referred to as the dollar, U.S. dollar, American dollar, or colloquially buck) is the official ...

6 billion in stock. The deal had originally been announced with a value of $7.8 billion, but the stock market plummeted before the deal closed in October. Nortel rolled the ACEDirector and ACESwitch products into its Personal Internet product line, but one year later sales had slowed down. On February 22, 2009 Nortel Networks announced they would sell the Alteon application switching line to

, for $17.65 million. In November 2013, Radware announced the Alteon NG, marketed as an

References

{{Dot-com Bubble 1999 initial public offerings 2000 mergers and acquisitions Dot-com bubble Nortel