Alteon WebSystems Incorporated , originally known as Alteon Networks, was an Internet infrastructure company based in San Jose, California

San Jose, California

San Jose is the third-largest city in California, the tenth-largest in the U.S., and the county seat of Santa Clara County which is located at the southern end of San Francisco Bay...

.
Alteon was acquired by Nortel Networks on October 4, 2000.

History

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

Alteon introduced innovative products such as the ACEswitch 180, which was the first network switch

Network switch

A network switch or switching hub is a computer networking device that connects network segments.The term commonly refers to a multi-port network bridge that processes and routes data at the data link layer of the OSI model...

 to deliver Ethernet

Ethernet

Ethernet is a family of computer networking technologies for local area networks commercially introduced in 1980. Standardized in IEEE 802.3, Ethernet has largely replaced competing wired LAN technologies....

 with selectable speed, 10/100 or 1000 Mbit/s, on every port via autonegotiation

Autonegotiation

Autonegotiation is an Ethernet procedure by which two connected devices choose common transmission parameters, such as speed, duplex mode, and flow control. In this process, the connected devices first share their capabilities regarding these parameters and then choose the highest performance...

. Their ACEdirector Layer 4-7 switch

Multilayer switch

A multilayer switch is a computer networking device that switches on OSI layer 2 like an ordinary network switch and provides extra functions on higher OSI layers.- Layer 3 Switching :...

 was designed as an integrated services front-end and server load balancer. They also introduced Jumbo Frames

Jumbo Frames

In computer networking, jumbo frames are Ethernet frames with more than 1500 bytes of payload. Conventionally, jumbo frames can carry up to 9000 bytes of payload, but variations exist and some care must be taken when using the term. Many Gigabit Ethernet switches and Gigabit Ethernet network...

 (up to 9,000 bytes) with their ACEnic adapters, and supported by their switches.

In addition to their Server Switches, Alteon produced the first Gigabit Ethernet

Gigabit Ethernet

Gigabit Ethernet is a term describing various technologies for transmitting Ethernet frames at a rate of a gigabit per second , as defined by the IEEE 802.3-2008 standard. It came into use beginning in 1999, gradually supplanting Fast Ethernet in wired local networks where it performed...

 network interface card (NIC) in 1997. Alteon's third generation Gigabit Ethernet NIC (code named "Tigon") became the basis for Broadcom

Broadcom

Broadcom Corporation is a fabless semiconductor company in the wireless and broadband communication business. The company is headquartered in Irvine, California, USA. Broadcom was founded by a professor-student pair Henry Samueli and Henry T. Nicholas III from the University of California, Los...

's family of ethernet controllers (series BCM570x) and has shipped over 60 million cores. It was used in low-cost NICs from vendors such as 3Com

3Com

3Com was a pioneering digital electronics manufacturer best known for its computer network infrastructure products. The company was co-founded in 1979 by Robert Metcalfe, Howard Charney, Bruce Borden, and Greg Shaw...

.

In July 2000, Nortel Networks announced it was buying Alteon for US$

United States dollar

The United States dollar , also referred to as the American dollar, is the official currency of the United States of America. It is divided into 100 smaller units called cents or pennies....

6 billion U.S. 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 Inernet product line, but one year later sales had slowed down.
On February 22, 2009 Nortel Networks announced they would sell the Alteon corporate switching line to Radware

Radware

Radware , is a provider of integrated Application delivery, Network Security and Load balancing solutions based in Tel Aviv, Israel. Radware, which is a member of the Rad Group of companies, is a public company and its shares are traded on NASDAQ.- History :...

, for $17.65 million.

External links

• "It sucks." Rejected Print advertisement, 1999. "Did You Think You Could Ever Be This Happy Again?"