LAN Professional - the Cabletron channel in Brazil

Its own judicial recovery filing records the scale: revenue above ten million reais by the end of 2000, and at its height approximately ninety per cent of Enterasys distribution in the country. Customers named in that document include Volkswagen and Chevrolet, Unicamp and Mackenzie, Banco do Brasil, Infraero, TAM and Embraer, and the Albert Einstein and Samaritano hospitals.

The Cabletron reorganisation of early 2001 is the hinge. Cabletron split into Enterasys Networks, Riverstone Networks, Aprisma and GNTS, and the problem became keeping a distribution business alive across a manufacturer that had ceased to exist as one. All four of those names appear elsewhere on this timeline. Here is what the split looked like from the channel, which is the side that has to keep selling while the vendor decides what it is.

From 2005 it was CTA, Centro de Treinamento Autorizado, for F5 Networks and IronPort across Brazil and Mercosur. The authorised F5 curriculum in this country was taught from a room in Brooklin. Authorised training arrives in a market through a company willing to build the laboratory, and it usually arrives inside a distributor.

The document recording all of this is a filing in the First Bankruptcy and Judicial Recovery Court of Sao Paulo. A company’s clearest surviving account of what it was is frequently the one it wrote while asking a court for time.

PRIME worked directly with this company up to 2000, mostly with its training operation and occasionally testing equipment. Its offices were within walking distance of Cabletron Systems on Avenida Jurubatuba, which is the ordinary geography of a distribution relationship: the manufacturer and the channel that carries it end up on the same street.