Packeteer's last chapter was a bidding fight: a hedge fund offered $5.50 a share, and a rival paid $7.10. That came nine years after its IPO. In 1999 the Cupertino company sold PacketShaper, a box that sat on a company's internet link and set priorities. Business apps went first. Music downloads and web surfing waited. Corporate networks were filling up with new kinds of traffic, and Packeteer gave IT managers a way to see it and control it.

Shaping Every Packet

Robert Packer and Brett Galloway co-founded Packeteer, which was incorporated in January 1996 and began shipping products in February 1997. Its PacketWise software classified the traffic on a network, measured it, controlled the flows and reported on performance. Installing a PacketShaper required no changes to the rest of the network. Partners such as Lucent resold the technology under their own names. The bet was that bandwidth would stay costly enough that companies would pay to manage it.

Two Bids for One Company

Packeteer priced at $15 a share in July 1999 and listed on Nasdaq as PKTR. It rode the dot-com boom, then the bust, and stayed in business selling to large enterprises. In March 2008, the hedge fund Elliott Associates launched a hostile tender offer at $5.50 a share. Blue Coat Systems topped it with an offer of $7.10 a share in cash in May 2008. Blue Coat completed the deal, and Packeteer left Nasdaq in June 2008.

Cover: Arcadian Shepherd Boy and His Flock of Sheep, Heinrich Reinhold. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a shepherd guiding his flock (directing traffic).