Zeus technology payback for Riverbed
The enduring value of Cambridge UK technology has been demonstrated in an all-California deal involving software created by Adam Twiss’ company Zeus.
Riverbed Technology, the San Francisco company which paid $140 million for Cambridge-based Zeus almost exactly a year ago, has already recouped over half the cash it laid out.Zeus' main product at the time was Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager (ZXTM) which Riverbed rebranded as Stingray and describes as Application Delivery Controller or ADC.
Riverbed’s fellow NASDAQ-quoted company Juniper Networks, in Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, has now paid $75m upfront to license Stingray.
So Zeus’ Cambridge technology will end up inside Juniper products and presumably help fund investment in the business group that used to be Zeus and was acquired by Riverbed.
Juniper and Riverbed have forged a technology partnership in wide area network (WAN) optimisation, application delivery and mobility to deliver market-leading technologies for enterprises looking to increase the efficiency of their IT infrastructures and securely deliver better performance of applications across devices, networks and the cloud.
A joint statement said that as the application acceleration market moved toward more convergence between the network and application layers, both companies recognised the need to invest in next-generation solutions that will deliver better performance, security and scale across any environment.
Juniper said that the former Zeus technology would enhance its capabilities in key network domains across the enterprise, including in the data centre, across WANs, and consumer and business devices through new application networking technologies that better manage, scale and optimise any application’s use of the network.
Adam Twiss co-founded Zeus Technology from his student bedroom in 1995 along with Damian Reeves while they were undergrads at Churchill College.
Twiss later founded Saviso, CacheLogic and most recently Versio4 – and speculates that a spin-out from the new venture is a future probability; a fifth dimension.
Twiss previously told Business Weekly that Versio4 was doing Internet technology product development – mainly for a partner customer in SE Asia but with other customers as well. It's 100 per cent self-funded, profitable and doing about a million in revenue.
• PHOTOGRAPH SHOWS: Adam Twiss
