So there’s a group of former players in the load balancing/traffic management space, once giants in the industry that are now playing in other markets and at best, are half-heartedly into the load balancing space.
These include:
- Cisco
- Radware
- Foundery Networks
- Nortel (Alteon)
- Extreme Networks
Cisco seems to have a habit of innovation by checkbook. Nothing wrong with that, but the products they buy don’t tend to evolve much. Cisco bought ArrowPoint for $6.7 Billion in 2000. Now, I loved the ArrowPoint boxes, but it’s 2007 and those boxes exist almost as they did back in 2000. Same goes for the other three (or more?) load balancing companies Cisco bought.
Nortel seems to have stopped pushing the Alteon line. I even heard a rumor that Nortel was on the verge of selling Alteon, but decided not to because it would be embarrassing for sell a company for a few dozen million when you bought it for $8 billion.
I think everyone got a hangover from the load balancer hype of the dot-com boom. Most people, including the head executives, sales, and SEs of these companies seemed to jump into security during the bust years.
Now of course, the load balancing market is seeing the resurgence that I can’t seem to shut up about, but most of the exciting stuff is happening on the lower-end of the price point.
On the higher end, the hot item is now WAN optimization, accelerating connections between two offices. Â A great technology, especially if you’re the one selling it (requires several boxes per location, ending up with more volume in unit sales than load balancing could ever do).
