Former type Public Industry Networking Founded 1996 Parent organizations Radware, Nortel | Traded as NASDAQ: ATON Fate Acquired Ceased operations 2000 | |
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Defunct 2000 acquired by Nortel
2009 sold to Radware Products Network switches
Network interface controllers Headquarters San Jose, California, United States | ||
Alteon WebSystems Incorporated, originally known as Alteon Networks, was a computer network hardware company based in San Jose, California. Alteon was acquired by Nortel Networks on October 4, 2000. On February 22, 2009 Nortel Networks sold the Alteon application switching line to Radware.
History
Alteon Networks was founded in 1996 by Mark Bryers, John Hayes, Ted Schroeder and Wayne Hathaway. Initial venture capital investors were Matrix Partners and Sutter Hill Ventures. Dominic Orr became chief executive in October 1996.
Alteon introduced innovative products such as the ACEswitch 180, which was the first network switch to deliver Ethernet with selectable speed, 10/100 or 1000 Mbit/s, on every port via autonegotiation. Their ACEdirector Layer 4-7 switch was designed as an integrated services front-end and server load balancer. They also introduced Jumbo Frames (up to 9,000 bytes) with their ACEnic adapters, and supported by their switches.
In addition to their Server Switches, Alteon produced the first network interface controller (NIC) in 1997 that used Gigabit Ethernet (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'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.
In July 2000, Nortel Networks announced it was buying Alteon for US$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 Radware, for $17.65 million.
Radware launched the Alteon NG, a next generation Application Delivery Controller in November 2013. The Alteon NG platforms support application delivery controller virtualization and enable organizations to consolidate legacy devices while providing end-to-end local and global load balancing capabilities for all Web, cloud and mobile based applications.