Vendor lineage
Procera Networks - the company that reads the traffic
Deep packet inspection vendor, taken private in 2015 and merged into Sandvine in 2017.
Procera Networks built deep packet inspection systems - PacketLogic - which identify what an application flow actually is, so that an operator can measure it, prioritise it, charge for it or block it. Francisco Partners took the company private in 2015 for US$240 million and merged it with its long-standing rival Sandvine in 2017, keeping the Sandvine name.
Deep packet inspection is the same capability described elsewhere on this site under filtering, and it raises the same question. A system that can tell a video stream from a voice call so the voice call is not delayed, is the identical system that can tell a person is using a particular messaging application. The engineering does not distinguish between those uses; only policy and law do.
That is not an abstract observation about this company. In 2016 an engineer resigned over a proposed deployment, and Forbes reported on the use of the technology in Turkey the same year. Both are cited here because a timeline that records what equipment does should record what it has been used for, and because the people who build these systems are sometimes the first to say so.
The commercial history is briefer. Public through a reverse merger in 2003, on NASDAQ from 2011, bought under pressure from activist shareholders in 2015, then merged with the competitor it had spent a decade against - both by then owned by the same investor. Two rivals in one market end up as one company because one buyer wanted both, which is a pattern this timeline records repeatedly.
- Procera Networks (Wikipedia): moved to NASDAQ as PKT in December 2011; bought the Canadian deep packet inspection company Vineyard Networks in 2013 for C$28 million, sold onward to equipment vendors as the Network Application Visibility Library; acquired by Francisco Partners in 2015; in 2017 Francisco Partners acquired Sandvine and merged it with Procera. The article cites Forbes, October 2016, reporting on the use of the company’s technology in Turkey
- Converge Digest - Procera, based in Fremont, California with significant operations in Sweden, whose PacketLogic platforms use deep packet inspection for analytics, traffic management and enforcement for broadband operators, mobile operators and academic institutions; the combined company operates under the Sandvine name, Sandvine having been founded in 2001 in Waterloo, Ontario by a team from PixStream, which Cisco had acquired that same year for C$554 million
- TheStreet, April 2015 - Procera agreed to a US$240 million buyout by Francisco Partners at US$11.50 per share, after months of pressure from activist shareholders; the company had gone public in 2003 through a reverse merger
- Founding year: 2002