Wellfleet - one half of Bay Networks

Wellfleet was founded in June 1986 by Paul Severino with Bill Seifert, Steven Willis, Jennifer Lamonakis and David Rowe, in Bedford and later Billerica, Massachusetts. Severino arrived at it by a route worth recording: he had founded Interlan in 1981 to sell Ethernet products, concluded the company was undercapitalised, engineered its sale to Micom in 1985 for sixty-five million dollars, and then found the staff job that came with it intolerable. He left in September 1985 looking for a company to start, and what kept returning was the problem of interconnecting local networks over T-1 circuits.

That problem was the internetworking market, and the timing put Wellfleet directly against Cisco, founded two years earlier. It announced its first product before the end of 1987, shipped for revenue in mid-1988, went public in 1991, and was ranked by Fortune as the fastest-growing company in the United States in both 1992 and 1993. Almost nothing about that trajectory suggests a company with a problem.

It had one anyway, and it was structural rather than commercial: Cisco was winning the router market it needed, and no growth rate closes a gap against a competitor growing from a larger base. In October 1994 Wellfleet merged with SynOptics in a deal worth 2.7 billion dollars to form Bay Networks - two companies each strong in one layer, combining to face a rival strong in both.

The reading is the one this timeline keeps producing. A merger of equals between two healthy companies is almost always a defensive move against a third, and the combined company inherits two cultures, two product lines and two headquarters while the rival inherits nothing. Bay Networks was acquired by Northern Telecom in 1998, four years later.