Stories about: Bay Networks

Users should chart the progress of Avaya's purchase of Nortel's enterprise assets carefully, so that they are spared any unpleasant product integration or rationalization surprises.

Avaya may be competing against other suitors in its efforts to acquire the enterprise assets of Nortel Networks, published reports indicate.

A decade ago I was working for Bay Networks in Santa Clara, California. Bay Networks was number two in the internetworking hardware market, with annual revenue of about US$2 billion. Bay was bought in 1999 for $9 billion by Nortel Networks, a telecom hardware manufacturer on an acquisition spree. Faced with a very different corporate culture, I chose in 2000 to accept the position of Director of Vertical Marketing at a small e-commerce startup named Enigma in Boston, Massachusetts.

In 2007,we designated more than 90 start-ups as worth watching. After a second look, we picked these 10 as offering what matters most in the enterprise -- agility, seamless integration and pervasive connectivity.

A Look at the all time greatest controversies in the history of the networking industry.

Aspiring entrepreneurs can only dream about a track record like Selina Lo's. First there was Centillion, a networking startup that Lo co-founded, and Bay Networks purchased for US$100 million in 1994. Lo's next act was Alteon, a maker of Gigabit Ethernet adapters that Lo joined in 1996 and transformed into Alteon WebSystems, a maker of content-aware switching hardware, before helping to sell Alteon to Nortel at the apex of the dot-com craze in July, 2000, for US$7.8 billion. It was a master stroke of good marketing and good timing that made Lo very wealthy.

Home networks, once considered a toy for the ultimate geek, cropped up all across the show floor at this year's Comdex.

Second time lucky