Shiva Corporation

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

~ the goodbye ~

Shiva was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1985 by Frank Slaughter and Daniel Schwinn, both MIT graduates. The first products were AppleTalk hardware, which in 1985 meant getting Macintoshes on a LocalTalk network to reach something that was not another Macintosh. In 1990 the company bought FastPath, an AppleTalk to Ethernet gateway, from Novell.

The pivot that made the company came at the turn of the decade. NetModem/E arrived in late fiscal 1991 and the LanRover line followed in fiscal 1992. A LanRover was a rack box with an Ethernet port on the back and a bank of modems inside. Somebody at home or in a hotel dialed the number, the box picked up, and their PC behaved as if it were plugged into the wall at the office. Shiva sold these by the thousand to corporations through the middle of the decade and became, for about four years, the name in that category.

The growth was extraordinary while it lasted. Revenue for the nine months ending 28 September 1996 was $151.9 million, up 85 percent on the same period a year earlier, with the remote access line alone up 139 percent. The company spent roughly $65 million on AirSoft of Cupertino that year for caching software meant to make a dial-up link feel less like one. It bought Spider Systems of Edinburgh in 1995 and ran it as Shiva Europe. Then the curve stopped.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the box at the other end ~

Everyone who used dial-up was talking to a machine like this, and almost nobody could name it. Shiva also wrote part of the dial-up TCP/IP stack that shipped with the 16-bit Internet Explorer on Windows 3, versions 3 through 5, so for a certain kind of user the word turned up on screen during the connection sequence without ever attaching to a product they could buy.

The market Shiva actually sold into is the part I have no contact with. Its customer was a company with a headquarters LAN and staff who needed to reach it from somewhere else, and Turkey in the late nineties had very little of that. Offices here were places you physically went. Working from home was not a category yet, and the idea of a corporate IT department buying a rack of modems so that staff could avoid coming in would have read as a joke at the price of a long call. The dial-up I did was to an ISP, and the box at the far end of that call was somebody else's problem.

~ the year it turned ~

The class period in the securities case that followed runs from 10 September 1996 to 31 March 1997, which is a tidy way of saying the business broke in the space of two quarters. The complaint alleged the company had misrepresented demand for its products and the competitiveness of its technology while filing statements with inflated revenue and receivables. Underneath the legal language was a simpler problem. Cisco and the telephone companies were both moving into remote access at the same moment, and the corporate customers who had bought modem racks were starting to buy dedicated circuits instead.

~ after intel ~

Intel announced the offer on 19 October 1998 at six dollars a share, about $185 million in cash. The merger closed in February 1999. Shiva went into the Intel Network Products Division. The lawsuit settled the same year for $4.35 million.

Intel kept it for under four years. On 12 November 2002 it sold the unit to Simple Access Inc., which promptly renamed itself Shiva Corp and set up development in Toronto, with Intel Capital holding equity in the buyer. That Shiva was bought by Mernet Secure Network the next year. Mernet went to Eicon Networks in February 2004, and Eicon renamed itself Dialogic in 2006. Four owners in five years. By the end the name was attached to a Canadian business that had no connection to Cambridge beyond having bought a word.

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