Packeteer

Founded in 1996 by Robert Packer, Brett Galloway, and Bob Luxenberg, Packeteer, Inc. was a Cupertino-based information technology company that became a key player in the Wide Area Network (WAN) optimization market. The company addressed the growing problem of internet congestion by developing networking appliances focused on application traffic management. Packeteer went public with an initial public offering on NASDAQ in 1999, which raised $54.8 million.

The business centered on selling hardware appliances and software designed to provide visibility, control, and acceleration of application traffic across WANs for corporate clients and internet service providers. Its core business model involved selling these products through a global network of over 500 distributors and sales offices. Packeteer's primary product line was the PacketShaper, an appliance offering traffic shaping, compression, TCP & HTTP acceleration, analysis, and reporting. This technology allowed network managers to prioritize business-critical applications, ensuring their performance by managing bandwidth and controlling data traffic. Over the years, Packeteer expanded its portfolio through strategic acquisitions. In 2000, it acquired Workfire Technologies to enter the web acceleration market. This was followed by the acquisition of Mentat in 2004, which added the SkyX product for TCP acceleration and high-latency link optimization. In 2006, the company purchased Tacit Networks, incorporating the iShared (WAFS) and Mobiliti (mobile data protection) product lines into its offerings.

A significant milestone in the company's history was its acquisition by Blue Coat Systems in June 2008 for approximately $268 million. At the time of the acquisition, Packeteer had an installed base of over 50,000 units and more than 10,000 customers worldwide. The acquisition was intended to extend Blue Coat's leadership in the WAN optimization market by integrating Packeteer's application classification and traffic management technology into its own product suite. The PacketShaper technology continued to exist through a series of subsequent acquisitions; Blue Coat was acquired by Symantec in 2016, and Symantec's enterprise business was later acquired by Broadcom in 2019. The PacketShaper product line was eventually discontinued by Broadcom in 2020.

Keywords: Packeteer, WAN optimization, application traffic management, PacketShaper, network performance, bandwidth management, Blue Coat Systems, traffic shaping, quality of service (QoS), network appliances, TCP acceleration, wide area network, data compression, network visibility, application control, WAFS, iShaper, Mobiliti, Robert Packer, Brett Galloway