Foundry Networks
More info
- Creator
- Bobby Johnson
- Released
- 1996–2008
- Successor
- Acquired by Brocade
The switch maker whose fast Ethernet boxes wired the dot-com era's server rooms — and whose IPO was one of the period's most memorable first-day pops.
Bobby Johnson founded the company in 1996. The BigIron switches and ServerIron load balancers were built for throughput and were snapped up by the big web sites and internet providers as traffic exploded. The 1999 IPO was one of the dot-com bubble's most spectacular first-day surges.
After the bubble Foundry competed hard with Juniper and the rest, but was bought in 2008 by Brocade, which wanted into the Ethernet market. When Brocade was in turn broken up, the data-centre networking landed at Extreme Networks — a typical journey for a networking company built for one specific era.