Zeus Technology
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| Former type | Subsidiary of Riverbed Technology |
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| Industry | Technology |
| Founded | 1995 |
| Founder(s) | Damian Reeves, Adam Twiss |
| Defunct | 2011 |
| Headquarters | Cambridge, England, UK |
| Key people | Jim Darragh (CEO) David Day (CTO) |
| Products | Application Delivery Controller, Load Balancers, Web servers |
| Employees | 40 |
| Parent | Riverbed Technology |
| Website | http://www.zeus.com |
Zeus Technology, Ltd. is a software company based in Cambridge, England. Zeus Technology, Inc. is a wholly owned US subsidiary.
[edit] Timeline
Zeus' original product, first released in 1995, was Zeus Web Server which currently (2006) is one of the highest-performance web servers for Unix and Unix-like platforms. Zeus Web Server is the software of choice for the majority of participants in the SPECWEB benchmarks.
In 2004, Zeus released ZXTM Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager, a software load balancer for TCP and UDP based network protocols, and based on a previous Zeus Load Balancer product.
In 2005 press release, Zeus released the first in a range of own-name hardware appliances through an OEM relationship with Pyramid GMBH; Zeus changed suppliers to Sun Microsystems in 2008, but has now discontinued the production of hardware appliances of this sort. By focusing on software solutions alone, Zeus is unique amongst the other significant vendors in the Application Delivery Controller market (significance as indicated by meeting the market-share inclusion requirements of Gartner's Magic Quadrant).
2006 saw the release of Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager Virtual Appliance, announced to coincide with the launch of VMware's Virtual Appliance Marketplace. Zeus' virtual appliance is the first example of an ADC device referred to as a SoftADC.
In April 2008, Zeus released ZXTM version 5.0, with Java(TM) Extensions and SIP and RTSP capabilities, as well as IPv6 support, followed by version 5.1 later that year. October 2009 saw the release of version 6.0, accompanied by a minor product renaming from 'ZXTM' to 'Zeus Traffic Manager'.
In June 2011, Zeus acquired art of defence, a Bavarian software company that develops a distributed Web Application Firewall called hyperguard.
In July 2011, Riverbed acquired Zeus. [1]
[edit] History
Zeus Technology was founded in 1995 by Damian Reeves and Adam Twiss, while they were undergraduates at Churchill College, University of Cambridge.
The company grew rapidly during the excesses of the Dot-com boom. Zeus Technology was nominated one of the top 50 most important privately held companies in the world by Red Herring (2000/06) and one of the Top 100 Emerging Technology Companies by Tornado Insider (2001/05). A public flotation was anticipated (BBC News article), but Zeus Technology remains privately held.
During 2001 and 2002, almost 3% of the world's websites ran on Zeus Web Server Netcraft Reports. For much of 2003, Zeus Web Server was the third most popular webserver (after Apache and Microsoft IIS) (April 2003 Netcraft survey).
As competitors matured and Windows NT platforms became more commonplace in the web serving environment, Zeus Web Server's share shrank significantly. In April 2006, the Netcraft survey indicated that Zeus Web Server held approximately 0.7% market share.
In 2004 Zeus Technology released Zeus Traffic Manager (originally 'Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager', ZXTM), based on Zeus' earlier Zeus Load Balancer product. Zeus Traffic Manager manages application traffic, inspecting, transforming and routing requests as it load-balances them across the application infrastructure. Zeus's TrafficScript engine enables users to implement whatever traffic management policies are most appropriate, drawing on the whole range of capabilities of Zeus Traffic Manager. With version 5.0, Java Extensions can now be used to implement additional, complex traffic transformations and other policies.
[edit] Trivia
ApacheBench, the benchmarking tool bundled with Apache HTTP Server, was originally written by Adam Twiss and donated to the Apache Group:
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.0.41-dev <$Revision: 1.141 $> apache-2.0 Copyright (c) 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/ Copyright (c) 1998-2002 The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/
