Network General

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

~ the obituary ~

Sniffer is a lowercase word now. People use it for tcpdump and for whatever else is capturing frames off a span port, with no sense at all that they are saying somebody's trademark out loud. That is what happened to the company: the product name got loose and went generic, and the corporation it belonged to was folded into a security vendor on 2 december 1997 and never came back under its own name.

Harry Saal and Len Shustek had already run one networking company. Nestar Systems, founded in 1978, put local networks into schools and offices before most people had a reason to want one, did well for a while and was sold off in 1986. Inside Nestar there had been an internal tool for watching what was actually on the wire when something went wrong. That tool was the idea. Saal and Shustek started Network General in Menlo Park in may 1986 and shipped the Sniffer the same year.

The Sniffer was a portable computer with a network card and software that decoded every protocol it saw and told you, in words, what was happening. Before it existed, diagnosing a broken network meant an oscilloscope and a theory. After it existed, you sat down next to the problem and read it. From two employees in 1986 the company went to $8.9 million of sales by the end of 1988, an IPO on the Nasdaq in february 1989 as NETG, and by 1995 nearly a thousand people and $631 million in cumulative Sniffer revenue.

I have never touched one. The Sniffer was a five figure box owned by the network team at a bank or a carrier, wheeled to the floor where the problem was. What I have used instead is the free lineage that took its market from underneath, which is a laptop running a decoder somebody wrote and then gave away. The thing Network General sold turned out to be the software, and software with no hardware attached to it is very hard to keep charging five figures for.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

The nineties were the right decade to sell network diagnosis. Every company was putting in Ethernet and token ring at the same time, running protocols that did not agree with one another, and nobody on staff had done any of it before. Network General bought a one person outfit in New Jersey in december 1989 for its LAN Patrol monitor, rebranded it WatchDog, and later added a handheld WAN analyzer through the Progressive Computing acquisition of august 1991. None of the extras mattered much. The Sniffer was the company.

Hewlett-Packard came in years later with its own analyzers and never displaced it. What eventually did was not a competitor with a better box. It was the slow arrival of packet capture as an ordinary feature, first in switches and then in free software that ran on hardware you already owned.

~ what it became ~

McAfee Associates and Network General signed in 1997 and closed on 2 december, a stock for stock deal valued at over $1.3 billion that produced Network Associates, briefly the largest independent network security and management software company in the world. Weeks later the same company paid $35 million for Phil Zimmermann's PGP. Saal and Shustek both left soon after. Network Associates spent the next several years unwinding: PGP went out to its own company in 2002 and on to Symantec in 2010, and the Sniffer business was sold in mid 2004 to Silver Lake and Texas Pacific Group for $275 million in cash. The buyers put the old name back on it, and Network Associates renamed itself McAfee.

So there were two Network Generals, and the second one was a private equity vehicle wrapped around a product line rather than a startup. It lasted three years. NetScout Systems signed for it on 19 september 2007 and closed on 1 november for about $205 million.

~ the next chapter ~

NetScout kept selling Sniffer software for a couple of years, then in 2018 divested the handheld network test tools, including what was left of the Sniffer name, to StoneCalibre. That is four owners after the merger that ended the original company, which is the usual number for a product that people still want under a name nobody is willing to invest in.

Len Shustek became the founding chairman of the Computer History Museum board and stayed in the chair for decades, so the man who built the machine for reading traffic nobody could otherwise read spent his second career on an institution for keeping dead machines legible. Harry Saal went into philanthropy and other boards. The word they left behind is in every network engineer's vocabulary and almost nobody using it could name the company.

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