NetManage

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

~ the obituary ~

Windows 3.0 had no concept of the internet. If you wanted a PC running it to speak TCP/IP, you bought software, and one of the things you could buy was Chameleon, which NetManage had been selling since 1990. It was a network stack with a suite of applications sitting on top, and at the time it was the only fully DLL-based multithreaded sockets implementation available for Windows. That is a sentence that mattered enormously to a few thousand people and to nobody else on earth.

The company was founded by Zvi Alon, an engineer trained at the Technion in Israel, with headquarters in Cupertino and its development center at the MATAM technology park in Haifa. NetManage put its sockets specification into the public domain, and that specification fed into the design of Winsock, the interface every Windows program that touches a network would end up using. The company wrote down how a Windows application should talk to a network, then gave it away. Microsoft implemented it inside the operating system and charged nothing for it.

What that did to the market for TCP/IP software is already told on this site under FTP Software, which NetManage bought in 1998 for less than the cash sitting in its bank account. Two vendors of the same doomed product, one absorbing the other on the way down.

~ the case file ~

~ one windows too late ~

My first connection was in 1998, on Windows 98, which meant I never had to think about where a TCP/IP stack came from. You opened Dial-Up Networking, you typed in the TTNet number, and the networking part was already in the box with everything else. The whole product category NetManage was built on had been closed for three years by the time I arrived.

I only found out it had ever existed much later, reading about Trumpet Winsock and wondering why a shareware program would need to exist for something the operating system obviously did. There is a version of my childhood in which getting online is a software purchase you research and save up for, and I missed it by one release of Windows.

~ the second career ~

The unusual part is what NetManage did afterward, because most companies in its position simply folded. In 1999 it bought Wall Data, whose product RUMBA was a terminal emulator for getting PCs onto IBM mainframes, and reinvented itself as a host access company. Nobody writes nostalgic blog posts about green-screen emulation. It had customers, though, and those customers had mainframes they were never going to switch off, which is a better foundation than most of the 1990s internet software industry was standing on.

The numbers say it worked. Revenue passed 100 million dollars for the year ending 31 December 2000, years after the business everyone remembers the company for had ceased to exist. Librados came in 2004. By the end, NetManage was an enterprise integration vendor that happened to have a famous past.

~ 7.20 a share ~

Micro Focus International announced on 30 April 2008 that it would buy NetManage for 7.20 dollars a share in cash. Against roughly 9.6 million shares and 1.6 million options outstanding, that valued the whole company at about 73.3 million dollars. The deal completed on 18 June 2008.

There was no collapse here and no last day anybody photographed. A company that had once written a piece of the plumbing of the consumer internet was bought, at a fair price, for a product line concerning mainframe screens. Micro Focus itself was bought by OpenText in January 2023, so the RUMBA lineage has changed owners again since.

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