Industry

The industry, from the inside

The corporate genealogies of networking and security: who founded each company, what they built, who bought whom, and where every bloodline ended up. Written from primary sources - SEC filings, inquiry reports, and the trade press of each era.

• Cabletron and Enterasys1996 – 2007
• Riverstone Networks2000 – 2002
• Cisco Systems2003 – 2008
• IronPort Systems2004 – 2005
• NetScreen and Juniper2009 – 2014
• Extreme Networks2013 – 2014
• FireEye, McAfee and Ixia2015 – 2019
• Pulse Secure2018 – 2019
• Palo Alto Networks2013 – 2015
• F52015 – present
• Fortinet2022 – present
• Netskope2024 – present
• Ping Identity and ForgeRock2025 – present
• Zscaler2026 – present
• Check Point2026 – present

Read the career record

Before any of these companies: the milestones they were built on

vendor114distributor6reseller2services17carrier2data centre3training4standards10
1. 18471847 - presentSiemens - the 1847 telegraph startupWerner von Siemens built the Indo-European telegraph line; the conglomerate's communications bloodline runs through EWSD, the Nokia JV, and Unify.
2. 18651865 - presentNokia - from paper mill to network giantA 160-year arc: rubber boots to world phone leader to one of the three companies that build the world's mobile networks.
3. 18751875 - presentToshiba - the company that gave the world flashFujio Masuoka invented NOR and then NAND flash at Toshiba in the 1980s - every SSD, phone, and memory card descends from it; the T1100 started the laptop era.
4. 18761876 - presentEricsson - 150 years of telephonyFrom an 1876 Stockholm telegraph workshop to the AXE switch, GSM, Bluetooth, and today's 5G triumvirate.
5. 18861886 - presentUnisys - computing's oldest bloodlinesBurroughs (1886) plus Sperry's UNIVAC - the ENIAC creators' company - merged in 1986: the deepest lineage in this section, still running ClearPath descendants today.
6. 18871887 - presentGetronicsA Dutch electrical firm from the 1880s that ended up owning what was left of Wang Laboratories.
7. 18951895 - presentNortel & Bay Networks - the giant that vanishedFrom 1895 Montreal to a third of Canada's stock index to the largest bankruptcy in Canadian history - and the $4.5B patent auction that ended it.
8. 18971897 - presentMarconi - wireless itself, then the bubbleGuglielmo Marconi bridged the Atlantic in 1901; a century later the company bearing his name became telecom's starkest dot-com cautionary tale, carved up by Ericsson in 2006.
9. 18981898 - presentBell Labs, Lucent & Alcatel - the transistor's bloodlineThe transistor, information theory, Unix, the laser, cellular - ten Nobel Prizes of foundations, spun into Lucent in 1996, merged with Alcatel in 2006, carried into Nokia in 2016.
10. 18991899 - presentNEC - Japan's first joint ventureFounded 1899 with Western Electric capital; NEAX switched the world's calls, the PC-98 owned Japan's PC market, and the C&C vision named the convergence everyone now lives in.
11. 19061906 - presentHoneywellA thermostat company that became a mainframe company and then went back to controlling physical things.
12. 19061906 - presentXerox - the company that fumbled the futureXerography built the empire; PARC invented Ethernet, the GUI, and laser printing - and networking's history runs through that lab.
13. 19101910 - presentHitachi - the industrial giant that stores the worldFrom a mine's five-horsepower motor in 1910 to VSP arrays, HGST drives, and Britain's express trains - the conglomerate whose storage lineage runs through every SAN.
14. 19111911 - presentIBM - the century companyPunched cards to System/360 to the PC to Red Hat: the company the rest of the industry defined itself against.
15. 19281928 - presentMotorola - the radio centuryCar radios to the walkie-talkie to the first handheld cell call and the moon itself; split in 2011 into Solutions and a Mobility arm that passed through Google to Lenovo.
16. 19311931 - presentBull - Europe's computing championPunch-card wars against IBM in the 1930s, the prophetic Gamma 60, nationalization and privatization - and a final act building Europe's first exascale supercomputer.
17. 19351935 - presentArrow ElectronicsStarted on Radio Row selling used radios; lost thirteen of its leaders in one afternoon and rebuilt.
18. 19351935 - presentFujitsu - Japan's computing standard-bearerBorn from a 1935 Fuji Electric spin-off (itself a Furukawa-Siemens venture), Fujitsu fought IBM with Amdahl, absorbed ICL, and built the K and Fugaku supercomputers.
19. 19391939 - presentHPE Networking - HP, 3Com, Aruba, JuniperThe great consolidation: from the Addison Avenue garage to the $14B Juniper merger.
20. 19481948 - presentFluke - the meters and certifiers in every field bagThe 87 multimeter and the DSX CableAnalyzer - and a 2015 three-way split (Fortive, NetScout, NetAlly) worth knowing cold.
21. 19481948 - presentRAND Corporation - where packet switching was imaginedPaul Baran's 1964 'On Distributed Communications' argued a network with no center could survive anything - AT&T declined to build it; the internet did.
22. 19511951 - 1999Wang Laboratories - the office before the PCAn Wang's core-memory patents funded a word-processing empire that owned the office of the late 1970s - and the PC unmade it inside a decade.Acquired by Getronics of the Netherlands in 1999. Getronics North America passed to KPN in 2007 and CompuCom in 2008.
23. 19571957 - presentDigital Equipment Corporation - the minicomputer kingKen Olsen's PDP and VAX machines defined two decades of computing; DEC co-authored Ethernet and ended inside Compaq in 1998.
24. 19621962 - 2008Electronic Data Systems (EDS)Invented the idea that a company could hand its computing to somebody else entirely.Acquired by Hewlett-Packard for nearly $14B, completed August 2008, and folded into HP Enterprise Services.
25. 19651965 - presentCyclades, Avocent & Vertiv - the physical layer of uptimeA Brazilian-founded console-server pioneer, the KVM leaders, and Liebert's computer-room weather - consolidated into the company whose product is uptime itself.
26. 19681968 - 1999Data General - the soul of a new machineEdson de Castro left DEC to build the Nova; Tracy Kidder's Pulitzer immortalized the Eagle; CLARiiON storage carried the DNA into EMC in 1999.Purchased by EMC in 1999, largely for its CLARiiON storage array line.
27. 19681968 - presentIntel & AMD - Fairchild's children: the x86 rivalryThe 4004, Moore's Law, and the second source that wrote AMD64 - one entry, because neither story parses without the other.
28. 19681968 - presentLumen, CenturyLink, Level 3 and Global CrossingA rural Louisiana phone company that ended up owning one of the internet's largest backbones.
29. 19711971 - presentCYCLADES (IRIA, France)Where the datagram was born.
30. 19721972 - presentSAP - five engineers against the mainframeEx-IBM founders built the ERP category in 1972; R/3 conquered the client-server world and HANA reinvented the core.
31. 19741974 - 1997Tandem Computers - the machine that never stopsJimmy Treybig's NonStop architecture made fault tolerance a product in 1976; it still runs stock exchanges and card networks today, as HPE NonStop.Acquired by Compaq in 1997 for $3B, and with Compaq into HP in 2002. The NonStop line survives as an HPE division, so the technology outlived the company by decades.
32. 19741974 - presentTech Data and SYNNEX (now TD SYNNEX)A father sold it to his son for ten thousand dollars; it is now the largest technology distributor in the world.
33. 19751975 - presentMicrosoftRed Education partnerThe platform company: Windows, Azure, and Microsoft 365.
34. 19761976 - presentAppleLost the first round of the personal computer market badly, and won every round after it.
35. 19761976 - presentHCLTechStarted because IBM left India, and forty-one years later bought IBM's software.
36. 19771977 - presentOracle - the database empireThe first commercial SQL database, four decades of acquisitions - Sun included - and 2025's handover to co-CEOs for the AI era.
37. 19771977 - 1993Tandy and RadioShackOutsold Apple three to one with a worse computer, because it had seven thousand shops.Tandy exited computer manufacturing in May 1993, selling the business to AST. The RadioShack chain continued long after the machines stopped.
38. 19791979 - present3Com - Ethernet leaves the labBob Metcalfe commercialized his own PARC invention; EtherLink wired the PC era, Palm rode along, and the story ended at HP in 2010.
39. 19791979 - 2016EMC CorporationMade storage a category of its own, then became the largest technology acquisition in history.Acquired by Dell for $67B - the largest technology acquisition ever at the time - forming Dell Technologies. The Dell EMC brand persisted on products until around 2020.
40. 19791979 - presentIngram MicroTwo schoolteachers started it, and it now moves fifty billion dollars of other people's products a year.
41. 19821982 - 2002Compaq - the clone that became the kingThree ex-TI engineers sketched a portable on a placemat, clean-roomed the IBM BIOS, and built the fastest company to a billion dollars - then bought DEC and merged into HP.Acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2002, and retired as a brand by 2010. It had itself absorbed Tandem in 1997 and DEC in 1998, so three companies ended inside one lineage.
42. 19821982 - presentCompTIAIts entire value was being owned by nobody, and in 2024 it was bought.
43. 19821982 - presentCompugraf (now CG One)A computer graphics company that became a security company, and kept the name for forty years.
44. 19821982 - 1995Lotus DevelopmentForecast a million dollars in its first year, made fifty-three, and shipped software still running four decades later.Acquired by IBM for $3.5B, primarily to obtain Notes. The brand persisted for years afterwards, and the Notes and Domino products were sold on to HCL in a deal announced 6 December 2018 for $1.8B.
45. 19821982 - presentSilicon Graphics - the geometry of HollywoodJim Clark's geometry engines rendered Jurassic Park and invented OpenGL; the name ended at HPE in 2016.
46. 19821982 - 2010Sun Microsystems - the network is the computerFour Stanford-orbit founders, SPARC, Solaris, Java - the dot in dot-com, absorbed by Oracle in 2010.Acquired by Oracle in 2010. Java, Solaris, ZFS and the identity stack that became ForgeRock all passed with it.
47. 19821982 - presentSymantecRed Education partnerThe security brand of a generation, now Broadcom's enterprise line.
48. 19831983 - presentBanyan Systems - the directory pioneerVINES and StreetTalk delivered a true global directory service years before NDS or Active Directory - and lost anyway; the idea won everywhere.
49. 19831983 - 2013Cabletron Systems and EnterasysSold cable assemblies out of a garage, grew into Cisco's most serious rival, then dismantled itself on purpose.Enterasys, the enterprise remnant of Cabletron, was acquired by Extreme Networks in 2013 for $180M.
50. 19831983 - presentDNS & BIND - the internet's phone book and its reference implementationMockapetris's 1983 design and Berkeley's software that ran it - delegation, caching, and forty years of the same wire format.
51. 19831983 - presentNovell - the network operating systemNetWare owned the LAN era and IPX ran the world's offices; the lineage ended at OpenText in 2023.
52. 19841984 - presentCisco SystemsDid not invent the router, but was the first to sell one that spoke everybody's protocol at once.
53. 19841984 - presentDell & Force10 - the direct model and its fabricA dorm-room assembler became the datacenter's broadest supplier - and the 10GbE pioneer it absorbed in 2011 became its switching lineage.
54. 19841984 - presentThe Sniffer lineage - Network General to NetScoutThe 1986 Sniffer made protocol analysis a profession; through Dolch luggables, Network Associates, and Arbor's DDoS telemetry, the whole bloodline converged on NetScout.
55. 19851985 - presentSophosStarted in Oxford the year before the first PC virus spread, and is still here under its own name.
56. 19851985 - presentWestcon-ComstorThe layer between the vendor and the reseller, which decides what is practical to buy in your country.
57. 19851985 - presentZTE - China's other giantShenzhen 1985, top-four in 5G - and the 2018 denial order that made supply-chain dependency the industry's most vivid lesson.
58. 19861986 - presentMadge Networks - Token Ring's standard-bearerFrom a Buckinghamshire farm to beating IBM in court at IBM's own game - and down with the protocol it championed: 'the Betamax of the networking world.'
59. 19861986 - presentNCSA - the campus lab that made the web visibleMosaic gave the web a face in 1993; NCSA httpd's orphaned patches became Apache; NCSA Telnet networked a generation of campuses.
60. 19871987 - presentAllied TelesisJapan's global Ethernet workhorse, from media converters up.
61. 19871987 - presentDolch (Kontron / Azonix lineage)The rugged luggable the Sniffer lived in.
62. 19871987 - presentEPIRed Education partnerData-centre training and TIA-942 certification.
63. 19871987 - presentFireEye, McAfee and IxiaThree companies that shared a distribution portfolio and almost nothing else.
64. 19871987 - presentHuawei - the Shenzhen ascentFrom a 1987 PBX reseller to the world's largest telecom equipment maker - and the center of the decade's biggest technology-policy storm.
65. 19871987 - presentMcAfee, FireEye & Mandiant - the road to TrellixThree security pioneers, one private-equity remix: Trellix and Skyhigh under STG, Mandiant inside Google Cloud, McAfee consumer private.
66. 19871987 - presentStefaniniA teacher started it in a spare room, and teaching is what won the first work.
67. 19871987 - presentThe access & home fleet - Netgear, TP-Link, Zyxel, Asus & Askey, Allied TelesisThe boxes everyone actually owns: the first hop of most packets on Earth, told as one fleet.
68. 19881988 - presentZyxelThe modem-era first-mover from Hsinchu.
69. 19891989 - presentAccentureSpent years fighting to keep a name, lost, and it was the luckiest defeat in consulting.
70. 19891989 - presentASUS + AskeyThe motherboard empire and its network-communications arm.
71. 19891989 - presentHTTP & Gopher - the web's protocol and the rival it eclipsedTwo futures shipped in 1991; one spring of licensing decided between them - CERN gave the web away, Minnesota asked for money.
72. 19901990 - presentGenesysTwo sons of Soviet emigres met at a card game and decided the phone call and the customer record should arrive together.
73. 19921992 - presentCiena - the company that taught fiber to carry colorsThe first commercial DWDM deployment (Sprint, 1996) multiplied installed fiber sixteenfold - and Ciena has compounded the optical layer ever since, Nortel inheritance included.
74. 19921992 - presentNetAppNamed itself after exactly what it sold, which turned out to be most of the strategy.
75. 19921992 - presentScanSourceDistributed products that were on their way to becoming commodities, and tried to arrive first.
76. 19931993 - presentCheck Point Software TechnologiesPatented stateful inspection, invented the firewall market, and then watched its own alumni build the competition.
77. 19931993 - presentNvidia - the GPU company that runs the fabricCUDA's decade-early bet, the AlexNet ignition, Mellanox - the network's biggest customer became one of its vendors.
78. 19941994 - presentNetscape - the company that opened the webClark and Andreessen's Navigator took the internet mainstream; SSL, JavaScript, and the cookie were invented here - the browser lost the war, the inventions won everything.
79. 19941994 - presentRed HatRed Education partnerEnterprise open source: RHEL, OpenShift, Ansible.
80. 19951995 - 2013AltaVistaBuilt to stress-test a processor, it became the best search engine on the web - and was then turned into a portal.Shut down by Yahoo on 8 July 2013; the domain has redirected to Yahoo Search ever since.
81. 19951995 - presentBrocade & Foundry - the Broadcom diasporaTwo 1990s pioneers, one 2017 dismemberment: SAN to Broadcom, data center to Extreme, campus and Wi-Fi to CommScope.
82. 19951995 - presentThe Apache Software FoundationThe web server that ran the web, built by eight people trading patches by email.
83. 19961996 - presentBlue Coat & Packeteer - the checkpoint companiesCacheFlow's pivot made the proxy a security platform; PacketShaper created traffic shaping - together, the prehistory of the SSE category.
84. 19961996 - presentExtreme NetworksGrew mostly by buying the enterprise businesses that larger companies had stopped wanting.
85. 19961996 - presentF5Named after a tornado, and spent thirty years moving up the stack from ports to applications.
86. 19961996 - presentMikroTik - Latvia's quiet giantRouterOS on commodity hardware: the company that made carrier-grade routing affordable everywhere - and stayed independent.
87. 19961996 - presentNETGEARThe company that put networking on the retail shelf.
88. 19961996 - presentNetScreen and Juniper NetworksOne firewall company whose alumni went on to found or shape most of the others.
89. 19961996 - 2006Riverstone NetworksSpun out of Cabletron to chase the metro Ethernet boom, and ran out of road when the boom stopped.Assets acquired by Lucent Technologies in early 2006 following a Chapter 11 filing, and absorbed into Alcatel-Lucent when the two merged later that year.
90. 19961996 - 2001SixDegrees.comThe first social network, and it failed because not enough people were online yet.Sold to YouthStream Media Networks in December 2000 and shut down the following year.
91. 19961996 - presentTP-LinkThe volume king of consumer networking.
92. 19961996 - presentWatchGuard - the red box that made the firewall an applianceThe 1996 Firebox turned security from a project into an object - and the mid-market has run on it since.
93. 19971997 - presentKasperskyWorld-class malware research and a geopolitical problem, in the same company, both real.
94. 19971997 - presentPaesslerRed Education partnerPRTG: the network monitoring standard of the mid-market.
95. 19971997 - presentRadware - the Zisapel lineageBorn of Israel's RAD Group in 1997; the ADC and DDoS specialist that rescued Alteon from Nortel's wreckage for ~$18M.
96. 19981998 - presentAkamai TechnologiesAnswered a question Tim Berners-Lee posed about congestion, and the answer became most of how the web is delivered.
97. 19981998 - presentDatacom - Brazil's networking manufacturerThe hometown entry: carrier gear, GPON, and a national OS, designed and built in Rio Grande do Sul since 1998.
98. 19981998 - presentEquinixTwo facilities managers left DEC because the telcos were refereeing a game they were playing in.
99. 19981998 - presentGoogleRanked pages by who linked to them rather than how often they said the word - and was nearly sold to AltaVista for a million dollars.
100. 19991999 - presentCyberArkRed Education partnerPrivileged access and identity security.
101. 19991999 - presentFreeRADIUSAuthenticates about a third of the people on the internet, and has had the same project leader since 1999.
102. 19991999 - presentQualysDelivered security scanning as a service in 2000, before anybody had a word for that.
103. 19991999 - presentSolarWindsSold the software that watches everything, which is exactly why somebody wanted it.
104. 20002000 - presentA10 & Kemp - the ADC challengersThe second tier that kept the load-balancing leaders honest: A10 from the throughput flank, Kemp from below.
105. 20002000 - 2010ArcSightDecided in advance what mattered, which is the opposite of what its main rival decided.Acquired by HP for about $1.5B, completing 22 October 2010. The product line then passed to HPE in the 2015 split, to Micro Focus on 1 September 2017, and to OpenText in 2023 - four owners in thirteen years.
106. 20002000 - presentAvayaRed Education partnerEnterprise communications: Aura, IP Office, and contact center.
107. 20002000 - presentFortinetFounded by the man who had already built one firewall company, on the same argument taken further.
108. 20002000 - 2007IronPort SystemsWorked out that the useful question about an email was not what it contained but who sent it.Acquired by Cisco for approximately $830M, announced January 2007, and folded into Cisco's security business.
109. 20002000 - presentRapid7Bought the industry's best-known attack toolkit, which is the opposite of what its main competitor did with open source.
110. 20022002 - presentImperva - from WebCohort to ThalesThe WAF pioneer founded by a Check Point co-founder, now the application-security arm of a French defense giant.
111. 20022002 - presentPing IdentityBet early that identity would have to work between organisations, not just inside one.
112. 20022002 - presentRiverbedRed Education partnerWAN optimization pioneer turned observability company.
113. 20022002 - presentTenableBuilt on a scanner a seventeen-year-old wrote, and then closed the source to fund the company.
114. 20032003 - 2024SplunkNamed after caving, because that is what searching your own logs felt like.Acquired by Cisco for approximately $28B, announced 21 September 2023 and completed 18 March 2024. It continues as a Cisco business unit.
115. 20042004 - presentArista NetworksRed Education partnerCloud-scale data-center and campus networking (EOS).
116. 20042004 - 2015Network1Bought by the company its own buyer had bought four years earlier.Acquired by ScanSource - announced 15 August 2014 and completed in January 2015. Traded as Network1-ScanSource for years afterwards and became ScanSource's Latin American communications business.
117. 20052005 - presentPalo Alto NetworksFounded by a Check Point alumnus on the argument that port numbers had stopped meaning anything.
118. 20052005 - presentTIVITA professional tennis player, a nightclub, and a company built by merging two others somebody already owned.
119. 20052005 - presentUbiquiti - enterprise features at prosumer pricesairMAX armed the WISPs, UniFi made the controller model a $200 purchase - and two incidents every security reader should know cold.
120. 20062006 - presentAmazon Web ServicesRed Education partnerThe cloud platform that defined the category.
121. 20072007 - 2020MobileIronRed Education partnerMobile device management pioneer, now part of Ivanti.Acquired by Ivanti, announced September 2020 and completed 1 December, alongside Pulse Secure.
122. 20072007 - presentZscalerArgued that if users are not in the office, the security stack should not be either.
123. 20092009 - presentCloudflareBegan as a project asking where spam came from, and became infrastructure after users asked it to stop the spam instead.
124. 20092009 - presentNutanixRed Education partnerHybrid multicloud and hyper-converged infrastructure.
125. 20112011 - presentCrowdStrikeBuilt on the argument that you should hunt the attacker rather than the malware - then proved, in one morning, what a lightweight agent everywhere really means.
126. 20122012 - presentElasticChanged its licence to stop a cloud provider, got forked, and changed it back three years later.
127. 20122012 - presentNetskopeStarted from the observation that nobody knew which cloud applications their own staff were using.
128. 20122012 - presentVersa Networks - the SASE independentTwo ex-Riverstone, ex-Juniper brothers building unified SASE - one of the last large independents in a consolidated market.
129. 20132013 - presentIllumioAssumed the attacker is already inside, and made the whole product about what happens next.
130. 20132013 - presentNozomi NetworksBuilt on the constraint that you cannot scan an industrial network without risking the plant.
131. 20142014 - 2020Pulse SecureA company created to hold a product line older than itself.Acquired by Ivanti alongside MobileIron, announced September 2020 and completed 1 December.
132. 20152015 - presentOpenAIFounded as a non-profit hedge against AI being controlled by one company, and now largely owned by one company.
133. 20172017 - presentIvantiA 2017 company assembled from forty years of other people's software, and the place two vendors on this site came to rest.
134. 20212021 - presentAnthropicFounded by people who left OpenAI over where it was going, and built around the bet that safety research and frontier capability have to happen in the same building.
135. 20212021 - presentKyndrylThe largest technology spin-off by headcount, and independence was the point rather than the price.