Vendor lineage
NetScreen and Juniper Networks
One firewall company whose alumni went on to found or shape most of the others.
NetScreen was founded in 1996 by Yan Ke, Ken Xie and Feng Deng, on the argument that firewalling should be done in silicon rather than on a general-purpose processor. Juniper Networks, founded in 1996 by Pradeep Sindhu out of Xerox PARC, bought it in 2004 for roughly $4B in stock - and the more interesting story is who left.
The ASIC argument was the founding one. Software firewalls of the mid-1990s ran on commodity CPUs and slowed down as rules accumulated, so NetScreen built purpose-designed silicon and sold predictable throughput. That is the same argument every hardware security vendor has made since, and NetScreen made it first at scale.
Ken Xie left in 2000 and founded Fortinet with his brother Michael. Fortinet appears on this site as a vendor whose training is delivered by its author.
NetScreen bought OneSecure in 2002, which had been founded by Nir Zuk - one of Check Point's first employees. Zuk stayed through the Juniper acquisition, left in 2005, and founded Palo Alto Networks, which overtook Check Point in firewall revenue by 2014.
Changming Liu, also from NetScreen, co-founded Aerohive, which Extreme Networks acquired in 2019.
So a single 1996 startup seeded Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks and part of Extreme, and absorbed a company founded by an early Check Point employee on the way. Four of the eight vendors this site teaches trace some part of themselves to that one building.
Juniper itself was the other half of this chapter. Founded to build carrier routers that could survive internet-scale traffic, it made JUNOS - one operating system across the line, with a configuration model that committed atomically or not at all - and spent two decades as the credible alternative to Cisco in service provider networks. Its SSL VPN business was later carved out and sold, becoming Pulse Secure, which is a separate chapter here and ended inside Ivanti.
2002 OneSecure $40-45M in stock
Intrusion prevention.
Nir Zuk and Rakesh Loonkar. Zuk was one of Check Point's first employees.
Zuk left in 2005 and founded Palo Alto Networks.
2004 NetScreen acquired BY Juniper ~$4B in stock
The firewall and VPN business, in one of the largest security acquisitions of its era.
- 2002 OneSecure (already inside NetScreen) — So Juniper acquired Nir Zuk's company by acquiring the company that had acquired it - and lost him a year later to the firm that would become its competitor.
Juniper's security line; the SSL VPN part was later sold and became Pulse Secure.
- Wikipedia: NetScreen Technologies - founders Yan Ke, Ken Xie and Feng Deng; the OneSecure purchase; the $4B Juniper acquisition
- Wikipedia: Nir Zuk - Check Point, OneSecure, NetScreen, and founding Palo Alto Networks in 2005
- Wikipedia: Juniper Networks - founded 1996 by Pradeep Sindhu, JUNOS, and the security line