ArrowPoint went public on the last day of March 2000, and five weeks later Cisco agreed to buy it for about $5.7 billion. The Massachusetts company made content switches. These boxes sat in front of a website's servers and read each incoming request, then sent it to the machine that could answer fastest. In the spring of 2000, every big site was straining under traffic, and that kind of gear was in hot demand.

Reading the Request

Chin-Cheng Wu founded ArrowPoint in April 1997. Ordinary network switches looked only at addresses. ArrowPoint's switches looked at what a visitor was asking for, such as a page, a picture or a shopping cart, and routed it to match. That let a busy site spread its load, keep a shopper on one server and survive a failed machine. Wu had earlier co-founded Arris Communications and run engineering at Cascade Communications.

Cisco Pays in Stock

ArrowPoint priced its IPO at $34 a share and began trading on Nasdaq as ARPT on March 31, 2000. In early May its stock jumped 27 percent in a day on rumors of a deal. On May 5 Cisco announced it would pay 2.1218 of its own shares for each ArrowPoint share. The deal was worth about $5.7 billion, Cisco's second-largest purchase after Cerent, and it closed later in 2000.

Cover: A Young Man with an Arrow, Benedetto Montagna. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for an arrow held ready (ArrowPoint).