Vendor lineage
Ixia and Keysight
Network test, bought by the part of Hewlett-Packard that Hewlett and Packard actually started.
Ixia was founded on 1 January 1997 in Calabasas, California, to test IP networks: generate traffic at line rate, break things deliberately, and measure what happened. When Keysight completed its acquisition in April 2017 for about $1.6B, Ixia served the top fifteen network equipment manufacturers, forty-seven of the top fifty carriers and seventy-seven of the Fortune 100, with more than 400 patents issued and pending.
**The category is worth explaining, because most engineers never buy from it and everything they do buy passed through it.** Before a switch, firewall or load balancer ships, somebody establishes what it actually does at line rate, under attack, with malformed input, and at the exact point it falls over. Datasheets quote numbers; test equipment is where those numbers come from, and where a competitor checks them.
Ixia grew by acquisition, and the direction is the interesting part: Anue Systems in June 2012, BreakingPoint Systems that August, Net Optics in October 2013. Anue and Net Optics were visibility and tap aggregation; BreakingPoint was security testing. **It moved from testing networks in a lab to seeing inside them in production - the same instrument that proves a device works becoming the instrument that watches it working.**
**Then the acquirer, which is where the lineage repays attention.** Keysight was spun out of Agilent in 2014. Agilent had been spun out of Hewlett-Packard in 1999, in an IPO that raised $2.1B and was the largest in Silicon Valley history at the time. **Keysight is HP's original test and measurement business** - the line of work that began with the 200A audio oscillator Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard built in a garage in 1939, which was the company's first product.
So the oldest thing HP ever did was spun off twice and now trades under its own name, while the businesses that kept the letters make printers, PCs and enterprise infrastructure. **The part everyone remembers from the garage story is the part that left.**
The deal closed on 18 April 2017 at $19.65 a share in cash, Keysight's largest since becoming independent - bigger than Anite at $606M in 2015. Ixia became the Ixia Solutions Group. Its chief executive at the time, Bethany Mayer, had come from HP, which makes it a smaller reunion than it appears.
**A note on why this card replaced another.** Ixia previously appeared here grouped with FireEye and McAfee, in an entry whose own tagline admitted the three shared a distribution portfolio and almost nothing else. **A shared line card is a fact about a distributor, not a relationship between companies**, and it belongs in a career chapter rather than a company history. FireEye and McAfee are covered by the Trellix lineage entry.
2012 Anue Systems ~$145-155M
Network visibility software and tap aggregation, founded by Kevin Przybocki, Hemi Thaker and Chip Webb.
Ixia's move from lab testing into production visibility.
Reported at $145M at announcement and around $155M afterwards; both figures circulate.
2012 BreakingPoint Systems ~$160M
Network security testing - generating realistic attack traffic against devices under test.
The security half of the test portfolio.
2013 Net Optics ~$190M
Network taps and monitoring access.
Completed the visibility line Keysight later cited as a reason for buying the company.
- Keysight SEC Form 8-K, 18 April 2017: acquisition completed at approximately $1.6B, $19.65 per share in cash; Ixia serving the top 15 network equipment manufacturers, 47 of the top 50 carriers and 77 of the Fortune 100; over 400 patents and more than 1,800 staff; reported as the Ixia Solutions Group
- Keysight Form 10-Q: merger agreement entered 30 January 2017, all-cash and approximately $1.6B net of cash acquired
- Wikipedia: Ixia founded 1 January 1997 in Calabasas, traded as Nasdaq XXIA, revenue $464M in 2014; the Anue, BreakingPoint and Net Optics acquisitions with dates
- Keysight's own history: the business dating to Hewlett and Packard's 1939 garage and the 200A audio oscillator; Agilent spun off from HP in 1999 with a $2.1B IPO, the largest in Silicon Valley history at the time; Keysight spun off from Agilent in 2014
- RCR Wireless: Keysight as HP's original test and measurement business; Ixia the largest acquisition since independence, after Anite at $606M in 2015; Bethany Mayer having come to Ixia from HP
- TheStreet: Net Optics at $190M in 2013, Anue at $155M and BreakingPoint at $160M in 2012