ArrowPoint Communications

As Web 1.0 gathered strength in the late 90’s, HTTP came to dominate internet traffic. Cheng Wu had the realization that a web-content-aware network could be built – “The Content-Smart Internet” as he called it in his seminal white paper – and founded Arrowpoint to do it. Eventually the products in the market that Arrowpoint helped create became known as “load balancers” and later “application-delivery controllers”. Arrowpoint went public in 2000 and was almost immediately acquired by Cisco for $6 billion.