Packeteer

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

~ the last words ~

If you were a student on a university network between roughly 2002 and 2008 and your download would not go above a certain speed no matter what you did, somebody had put a box in the path and told it what you were allowed to have. Several companies sold that box. Packeteer sold the one whose name network administrators actually said out loud.

It was incorporated on 25 January 1996 and started shipping in 1997, out of offices on North De Anza Boulevard in Cupertino. The founders were Robert Packer, whose surname made the company name almost too convenient, together with Brett Galloway and Bob Luxenberg. The product was the PacketShaper, and its trick was not throttling, which anyone can do. The trick was knowing what to throttle. It read traffic at the application layer and identified the program that had generated each flow, then applied a policy the administrator had written: this much for the database, that much for everything that looks like file sharing.

The business worked for a decade. Net revenues ran $72.7 million in 2003, $92.4 million in 2004, $112.9 million in 2005, and $145.1 million in 2006. It had listed on Nasdaq back in 1999 and held at least forty patents on network optimization methods. It also bought its way into adjacent problems. Workfire went in 2000 and supplied a web acceleration product. Mentat followed in 2004, bringing a satellite-link optimizer called SkyX, and Tacit Networks in 2006 added file services over slow connections. At the end it employed 428 people and sold more than half of everything it made outside the Americas.

~ the record ~

~ layer seven ~

The phrase Packeteer used for itself was Layer 7 traffic classification, and the precise meaning of that is what made these boxes controversial. Layer 3 tells you an address. Layer 4 tells you a port number, which in the 1990s told you the application by convention. By 2002 that convention had collapsed, because the software people actually wanted to use had learned to hide on port 80 along with the web.

So Packeteer wrote signatures. The box watched the shape and the content of a conversation and decided, without being told, that this was a particular file-sharing protocol or a particular streaming service, and then the administrator's policy took over. That is deep packet inspection by another name, several years before the term became politically radioactive. It sold to IT departments who framed it as making the accounting software usable, which at the time nobody argued with.

~ the throttle ~

The customers that made Packeteer famous were universities. A campus had an enormous link and no real control over who used it, and in 1999 Napster arrived and the file-sharing problem never left again. A PacketShaper in front of a dormitory could cap peer-to-peer traffic to a few percent of the pipe without blocking it, which was legally and politically much easier than blocking it, and the students on the other side experienced this as a download that simply refused to go faster.

My university years in Ankara ran from about 2003 to 2010, and that is precisely when campus networks everywhere were learning to do this. From the student seat the technology was invisible and the effect was not. Nobody tells you which vendor is slowing you down. You just learn which hours are worth trying.

~ the last good year ~

In 2007 the run ended. Net revenues slipped from $145.1 million to $144.5 million, and the slip was worse than it looks, because product revenue dropped eleven percent to $97.8 million while services held the total up. The company's own annual report blames a changing and increasingly competitive environment plus transition problems with new products. WAN optimization had become a crowded market and the pure traffic-shaping pitch was running out.

Blue Coat signed a merger agreement on 20 April 2008 and bought 3.5 million shares the same day from two Elliott funds for about $25 million. The tender offer opened on 1 May at $7.10 a share and closed on Friday 30 May at five o'clock New York time, with 29.7 million shares tendered, taking Blue Coat to 89.6 percent. The subsequent offering period ran to 5 June. On 1 June every Packeteer director except Craig Elliott resigned and Blue Coat installed its own. The Form 15 that ended the company's existence as a public filer is dated 6 June 2008 and signed by Brian NeSmith, who was Blue Coat's chief executive and, by then, Packeteer's. packeteer.com has nothing listening on it today.

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