Vendor lineage
Wellfleet - one half of Bay Networks
The router company that merged with a hub company, producing a business that was briefly the credible alternative to Cisco.
Wellfleet Communications built multiprotocol routers during the internetworking window, competing directly with Cisco at a time when it was not settled who would win. Its 1994 merger with SynOptics produced Bay Networks, which for a few years was the most credible alternative to Cisco that the enterprise market had.
A merger of equals between a router company and a hub company was strategically sound on paper: routers and wiring concentrators were the two halves of an enterprise network, and neither firm alone had the other's channel. What followed is the standard warning about mergers of equals, which is that two head offices, two cultures and two product roadmaps do not become one by agreement.
Reading Wellfleet and SynOptics together explains a name that otherwise appears from nowhere in the mid-1990s and disappears into Nortel in 1998.