Packeteer Inc. late Thursday bought
privately-held software firm Workfire
Technologies International Inc. for about $73 million in stock.
The Net security firm will exchange 2 million common shares for all
of Workfire’s outstanding common stock and options. The transaction is
expected to close in the third quarter and begin contributing to earnings by fiscal 2001.
Workfire will continue to operate out of its facility in Kelowna, British
Packeteer made waves last month with the release of its bandwidth management
Packeteer will inherit Workfire’s software technology,
which accelerates the transmission and rendering speed of Internet
applications by compressing traffic and increasing the throughput of the low
and medium speed connections via caching. Workfire prides itself on solving
the “last mile” dilemma of low to medium speed Internet connections that is
not addressed by today’s reverse-proxy and network-based caching solutions.
Tom Taylor, founder and chief technology officer of Workfire, said his
firm’s application acceleration software represents the next technological
wave for enhancing the performance of Web-based applications.
Columbia, Canada, as Packeteer’s Internet Acceleration Products group.
solution PacketShaper, which prevents file-swapping programs such as Napster Inc. and Gnutella traffic from
monopolizing their bandwidth capacity.
Plattsburgh State University in New York and St. John’s University in
Minnesota have deployed PacketShaper technology to control Napster bandwidth
utilization over their WANs (wide-area networks) and the Internet.
“We didn’t want to tell the students ‘you can’t access Napster’ and yet we
simply couldn’t afford to have Napster eat up all our bandwidth and impact
our other applications,” said John Muggli, network manager of the College of
St. Benedict and St. John’s University of Minnesota.
