Steelbox Networks

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

~ the eulogy ~

Six engineers started Steelbox Networks in Atlanta in 2003, most of them having worked together for twenty years already, on projects for Cisco and for Scientific-Atlanta. Their previous collective credit was the operating system behind the Cisco PIX firewall, and their chief executive, Richard Howes, held thirty patents on moving data around quickly and securely. The problem they picked next was the one the video surveillance industry was about to walk into: what happens to a camera network when it stops being twelve cameras and becomes two thousand.

The answer they built was a switch. Steelbox treated recorded and live video as streams to be routed between ports, with its own operating system called RTIK underneath, and it claimed a cost structure around 70 percent below the conventional approach. Customers were the sort who actually have two thousand cameras, the UK Highways Agency and the Moscow Metro among them. By 2007 it had roughly fifty employees and offices in fourteen states, and in 2008 Frost & Sullivan gave it a North American product innovation award for video surveillance storage.

None of that produced enough revenue. The company announced three funding rounds, the last of them $10 million in 2006, and when it went back to the market two years later the credit crunch was on and there was nothing there. Square 1 Bank, its creditor, foreclosed. Operations ceased across every office and the staff were let go. The trade press caught up with it on 20 November 2008, by which point it had been gone for weeks.

~ the dossier ~

~ the booth with the movie stars ~

The autopsy that circulated in the security industry at the time was unusually blunt about where the money went. IPVM's John Honovich pointed at the trade show booths, which were enormous, thirty feet by thirty or larger, and decorated with pictures of movie stars. He put the cost of building one and staffing it at a few hundred thousand dollars, and read it as a signal of spending that had gotten ahead of the business.

His second point was harder to fix. Steelbox could never explain in plain terms what it was selling. An architecture that was genuinely different from everything else on the floor is also an architecture that nobody arrives already understanding, and a buyer who does not understand it buys the thing next to it instead.

~ bought back out of the bank ~

On 22 January 2009 Adtech Global Solutions, an integrator in Alpharetta, announced that it had bought the Steelbox intellectual property in an Article 9 UCC foreclosure sale and had taken on key people including the founders Jim Jordan and Bill LeBlanc. "The community's reaction to Steelbox's exit from the market was simply overwhelming," said Tim Shadburn, the buyer's chief executive. "We felt we were uniquely positioned to bring it back."

Bringing it back meant the name went on a product line. By mid-2011 steelbox.com was serving a new site selling SteelSwitch and SteelVault under the old mark, and by 2012 the same domain resolved to Adtech's own homepage with Steelbox listed among its products alongside Verint and Juniper. For a few years the mark survived as a line item on somebody else's catalog page. Both ends of that arrangement are gone now: steelbox.com has no DNS record left, and adtechglobal.com answers with a 114-byte stub.

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