Foundry Networks

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

~ the obit ~

Foundry Networks made the boxes that the websites of the 2000s ran behind. Bobby R. Johnson, Jr. co-founded it in May 1996 and was still its chairman and chief executive on the day it was sold, which is rare enough in this industry to be worth stating first. The product was ethernet switching done in custom silicon rather than software, so a Foundry box could route at the speed of the wire. That was the whole argument: buy the switch and the router came with it.

It worked as a business almost immediately. The first half of 1999 brought $3.3 million of profit on $39.5 million of revenue, which for a three-year-old networking company in 1999 was close to miraculous, and net income reached $22.9 million for that year and $88.1 million for 2000. By the middle of 2000 it had somewhere between two thousand and twenty three hundred customers. Its own annual report puts the market value of the stock held by non-affiliates at about $9.1 billion, measured on 24 March 2000, two weeks after the Nasdaq reached the top it spent the next two and a half years falling away from.

Brocade agreed to buy the company in July 2008 and closed the purchase on 18 December 2008, at 4:09 that afternoon. Nasdaq suspended trading in FDRY before the open the next morning. Between the July agreement and the December closing the price per share went down rather than up, by $2.75.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ twenty five to one fifty six ~

Foundry went public on 28 September 1999. Five million shares at $25 each raised $125 million with Deutsche Banc Alex. Brown leading, and then the stock closed its first day at $156.25. That is a gain of 525 percent between the morning and the afternoon, on roughly 12 million shares traded, and in 1999 it stood as the second-largest first-day rise any American offering had ever produced. The only one above it was theglobe.com, at 606 percent.

I was fifteen that September, with a modem and no brokerage account, and the American offering window of that autumn was something you read about the week after it happened. The arithmetic is still hard to hold. A company three years and four months old, selling switches to internet providers, more than quintupled in value during one trading session on the strength of an argument about where packet forwarding should happen.

~ the repricing ~

On 21 July 2008 Brocade offered $18.50 in cash plus 0.0907 of a Brocade share for each Foundry share. The trade press valued that near $19.25 a share, or roughly $3 billion, and it rested on as much as $1.625 billion of committed bank financing. Then Lehman Brothers failed, and bank commitments made in July stopped meaning what they had meant in July.

Brocade came back. An agreement in principle at the end of October became Amendment No. 1 on 7 November 2008: $16.50 per share, all cash, no stock. Foundry got consolation terms written into the amendment. It had a two-week window from 7 to 21 November in which it was free to go shopping for a better offer, and a reverse termination fee of up to $125 million if Brocade walked away. Nobody better turned up. Shareholders approved on 17 December, collected about 24.9 cents a share out of the auction-rate securities the company had been sitting on, and the deal closed the following afternoon.

~ the iron ~

Everything Foundry sold was named after metal. BigIron and NetIron carried the backbone and carrier traffic while FastIron sat in office buildings, and ServerIron, the load balancer that stood in front of web farms, led its own category in port shipments by at least one analyst's count. The naming scheme outlived the company that invented it by a decade. Brocade kept selling the lines and then broke them up, so that by 2017 the campus business had gone one way and the data-center portfolio another, and a 1996 startup's product names were being shipped by firms that had never met it.

There is one more inheritance, and it is a strange one. The old corporate domain is gone, but foundrynet.com now serves an unofficial Foundry archive run by one named individual, relaunched in September 2026, cataloging a company that stopped existing eighteen years ago. It holds no manuals and no firmware, which makes it less an archive than a memorial with a hostname, and nothing else on the internet answers to the name any more.

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