Crossbeam Systems

» see crossbeamsys.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The product was a steel box with slots in it. You bolted it into a rack at a telephone company or a large corporate data center, and then you filled the slots with other people's security software: a Check Point firewall on one blade, an intrusion detection system from somebody else on the next. Crossbeam supplied the chassis and the operating system under it, along with the switching that moved traffic between blades at carrier speeds. Almost none of the software that made the box worth buying was written by Crossbeam.

Crossbeam Systems was incorporated on 23 November 1999 in Boxborough, Massachusetts, by Stephen Justus and Mike Akerman, with Throop Wilder joining the founding team the following year. It raised somewhere around 53 million dollars across six rounds. Matrix Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners led early, alongside Commonwealth Capital, and Intel Capital came in with Charles River Ventures and Tudor Investment later on. That is real money for a company most people in the industry could not have described.

The bet was that a network operator would rather buy one expensive telco-grade platform and collapse a whole rack of separate security appliances into it. For most of the 2000s that bet paid.

~ the dossier ~

~ other people's software ~

Crossbeam's value came entirely from the vendors who agreed to port their software onto its blades, and every one of those vendors was perfectly capable of selling hardware itself. Check Point, McAfee, IBM, Imperva, Sophos and Trend Micro were all partners, and most of them also shipped appliances that competed directly with the chassis their software was running inside.

That left Crossbeam in a layer with pressure on both sides. Above it the security vendors wanted the whole customer relationship for themselves. Below it, ordinary x86 servers kept getting faster and cheaper, and by the early 2010s the industry had started seriously discussing running network functions in software on commodity machines. The X-Series was sold on the premise that commodity machines were not good enough, and that premise had an expiry date built into it.

~ the carriers ~

The customer list was impressive and slightly comic in its range. Network World's roll of known Crossbeam customers ran to BT, Cell C in South Africa, NTT, Volkswagen and Motel 6. The telephone companies are exactly who you would expect to own a carrier-grade security chassis, and Volkswagen is a plausible large enterprise buyer. Motel 6 is a budget motel chain, and finding it on the same short list as BT tells you how few buyers there were for equipment priced this far up-market.

Leadership turned over hard. Peter George ran the company from 2001 until June 2007. Pete Fiore took over and held the job until his death in December 2009. Michael Ruffolo was named chief executive in 2010. Three chief executives in a decade, one of them dying in post, is a hard record to carry into a sales meeting with a buyer who needs the vendor to still exist in five years.

~ twice in one winter ~

In November 2012 Thoma Bravo, the private equity firm, bought Crossbeam. About five weeks later, on 17 December 2012, Blue Coat Systems announced that it was buying it from them, and said it expected to complete the deal before the year ran out. Network World, reporting it that day, pointed out the obvious: this was the second time Crossbeam had been acquired in 2012. No price was disclosed for either transaction.

The same article carries the scale comparison. Blue Coat had approximately fifteen thousand customers. Crossbeam had several hundred. The X-Series did not even run Blue Coat's own security applications at the time of the purchase, which suggests the chassis was bought for the telecom accounts attached to it and for the engineers who built it, rather than as a product anyone planned to keep selling under its own name. No closing announcement was ever published and no source records the day the Crossbeam name was retired, which is how brands at this end of the market usually go. No notice goes out. A product page stops being updated, and then one day it is gone.

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