Vendor lineage
Cabletron Systems and Enterasys
Sold cable assemblies out of a garage, grew into Cisco's most serious rival, then dismantled itself on purpose.
Robert Levine and Craig Benson founded Cabletron Systems in Rochester, New Hampshire in March 1983, working out of Levine's garage and selling cable assemblies. It became one of the largest networking companies in the world, and for a period in the early 1990s it was the credible alternative to Cisco in the enterprise.
The product that made it was the MMAC hub, and later the SmartSwitch line, sold with an operating philosophy that was unusual for the era: Cabletron ran its own field service organisation rather than pushing everything through resellers, which is why it had a reputation for showing up.
It bought aggressively through the 1990s, and the acquisitions matter more than the revenue figures, because they are what the company eventually broke apart into.
In 2000 Cabletron announced it would split itself into four independent companies rather than be broken up by anyone else. Enterasys took the enterprise switching business, Riverstone took the carrier and metro routing business built on Yago, Aprisma took network management with the Spectrum platform, and GlobalNetwork Technology Services took professional services. It is one of the few examples of a large networking company choosing dissolution as a strategy.
Enterasys carried the enterprise name for a decade, weathering an accounting scandal that led to executive convictions, before being taken private and then acquired by Extreme Networks in 2013 for $180M. So the enterprise line that began in a New Hampshire garage in 1983 now ships as Extreme.
The through-line worth noticing is that four separate entries on this timeline - Enterasys, Riverstone, Aprisma and eventually Extreme - all trace to the same 1983 garage, and two of them appear here as chapters of a career as well as companies.
1996 Network Express and ZeitNet
ISDN remote access and ATM switching, bought in the same year as the market argued about which technology would carry the enterprise backbone.
1998 Yago Systems ~$180M
Wire-speed Layer 3 switching, which became the SmartSwitch Router.
Spun out as Riverstone Networks in 2001, and an entry of its own on this timeline.
1998 Digital Equipment's network products business ~$430M
DEC's networking division, bought from Digital shortly before Compaq acquired the rest of it.
- 1957 Digital Equipment Corporation (origin, not a purchase) — DEC was founded in 1957 and defined the minicomputer era; its networking arm ended up at Cabletron and the remainder at Compaq in 1998, which HP then acquired in 2002.
- Wikipedia: Cabletron Systems - founded March 1983 by Robert Levine and Craig Benson, the 2000 four-way split into Enterasys, Riverstone, Aprisma and GNTS
- Wikipedia: Enterasys Networks - the enterprise successor and the 2013 Extreme acquisition at $180M