Nortel Sells Assets to Radware

By Mark Evans | Published: February 20, 2009

The rumored deal between Nortel and Radware turned out to have substance as Nortel has signed a “stalking horse” agreement that will see Radware acquire some of Layer 4-7 intelligent application delivery portfolio.

According to Nortel, this is a “363 Sale” – a process that companies under creditor protection in the U.S. must follow under Section 363 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, which “outline the establishment of bidding procedures for an auction that allows other qualified bidders to submit higher or otherwise better offers”. The idea is if a higher offer comes along, Nortel can take it.
As part of the deal, Radware has the option to increase its bid if another bid emerges.

The products in the portfolio include:

- Nortel Application Accelerators (NAA) 510 & 610
- Nortel Application Switches (NAS) 3408E, 2424E, 2424 SSL E, 2216E, 2208E.
- Nortel Virtual Services Switch (VSS) 5000.

More: LightReading has more details.

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  • horace_grimswold

    Flashback: 7/28/2000: Nortel acquires Alteon Systems for $7.8 billion
    http://www.nortel.com/corporate/news/newsreleas…

  • gmg733

    According to a source of mine, Radware thinks they are getting the entire Alteon base of customers. Little do they know, most of those are F5 customers now. HEHEHEHE!

  • fatzoff

    That buy is one thing that Mike Z can't be blamed for. But what the hell, lets blame him anyway.

  • less

    How long before the Believers notice Radware is an Israeli company and thread the Nortel fiasco into the global US-Zionist oil conspiracy.

  • protosphere

    It looks like a strategic play for Radware to expand its global presence.

    With approximately $88M annuial sales in 2007, I wonder just how much Radware offered. More importantly, just how much this will this assist Nortel's plight given its enormous growing debt and creditor shortfall under bankruptcy protection. Just a drop in the bucket I would imagine… yawners…

  • Pingback: Looking Back at Nortel’s M&A Spree | All About Nortel

  • exnt2

    20 million

  • Teleguy

    In worthless stock. It's meaningless. The real question is how much did nortel spend on the business after they bought it and how much did they make from it?

  • broadbandbill

    The right-wingers have been clipped by the very leftist Chinese government, who, by the way, are also our (US) creditors. Imagine that, the best capitalist system on the planet owned by a handful of commies. So long Greed, and good riddance…– bb

  • Cataractus

    Another of John Roth's disastrous acquisitions bites the dust. Keep in mind that Roth bought this company (Alteon) for $7.8 billion. Now the Zeroman sells it for just $20 million – a staggering loss of 99.75% of its original value.

  • less

    Its surprisingly captialist, this Workers' Paradise:

    Chinese companies plan to purchase a total of $2.23 billion worth of products and services on a buying spree to the U.K., a person familiar with the situation said Friday. The trip is part of a European shopping tour as Beijing looks to boost overseas investments and take advantage of tumbling asset values in hard-hit Western economies.

    Surely the world-savvy Euros won't be seduced by mere Mammon? What say the masses? How are the Chinese doing?

    Tang Hui and his family prospered as migrant workers during China's economic boom, earning $10,000 a year: enough to build a house, send a cousin to school and pay for his grandmother's medical bills.
    Tang Hui lost his manufacturing job in October just days after getting married.
    But those good days are over. The family's cash earnings have evaporated, snatched away by a manufacturing crash cascading across China caused by falling global demand for its goods.

    The nine people in the Tang family are facing an income of zero; their best hope to survive is to grow rice and raise pigs at home in the Sichuan Mountains.

    “I hope the government can help us during this crisis,” he says. “I hope it won't be like this for too long. Now, there is not even enough money to celebrate the holidays.”

    I was told the New World Order would eliminate the need for money for good, and Obama is its first Messiah, say the masses. Lets give it a chance. Again. Pretend its not the same old scam.

  • Casual_Observer

    If Nortel was/is proposing to be an enterprise-centric company, why would they sell the L4-L7 piece of the business ? Given that most of the innovation in networking has been at the higher layers of the OSI, wouldn't Nortel have been better off selling the L2/L3 switch/router portfolio ?

  • Hotwheeler1

    less, and your point is ?????…You must be Chinese

  • Hotwheeler1

    More like in the range of 10 million…

  • less

    Me Chinese, me play joke…

    Nah, the point is schmucks like Mike Z are 50% to blame that Thinkers are going off on their usual dim, rote peace-and-love tangents and spamming me with:

    President Obama: It's Time to Nationalize Insolvent Banks

    We, the people, became majority owners in many of the major banks. But we have no voice in the way the banks are run. If taxpayers are footing the bill for rescuing the banks, why shouldn't we get ownership, at least until private buyers can be found?

    Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman calls this a “a classic exercise in 'lemon socialism': taxpayers bear the cost if things go wrong, but stockholders and executives get the benefits if things go right.”

    Now the Obama economic team is proposing more of the Bush policy: the socialization of risk, the privatization of profits.

    President Franklin Roosevelt once told a group of activists lobbying him, “I agree with everything you said. Now go out and make me do it.”

    As part of our effort to help President Obama “do the right thing” CommonDreams.org has just launched a petition to President Obama urging him to nationalize the insolvent banks.
    Thanks for joining with us and for showing grassroots support for the bold, creative change Americans voted for.

    Craig Brown
    for the whole CommonDreams.org team

    p.s. Please forward this to your friends and family. Together, we can make a difference.

    </tears of joy and relief>

    Just give gernerouslyt, give them a few months and they'll ifx it all for us.Wee, the people.

    Why not fire the Mike Zs and get on with it? Tell him to step down already.

  • horace_grimswold

    you can't blame him for buying it, but you *can* blame him for selling it.

  • Another_Nortel_Watcher

    bb – remember that China is one of the oldest capitalist countries on the planet. The leftist regime is a 60-year unsuccessful blip in a couple of thousand years of recent history and China is in fact charging back towards a capitalist society at an amazing rate, given their size. The degree of disparity between the rural and urban populations is the only thing that holds them back. They have to maintain control over the 900M people who live outside the urban centers.

    By the end of next year, it is predicted that China will have the largest english-speaking population in the world. I'm also beginning to believe that China will 'own' the US in the same time frame. How ironic that a still-developing country is financing the most developed country. Pinch me, I must be dreaming.

  • Singapore1

    Nortel has never taken this space seriously and have decided to cut its losses due to poor management decisions over the past 10 years. F5 and Juniper have taken majority of Alteons old customer base as well as headhunting all the decent alteon engineers we acquired. If your a Nortel sales exec how can you honestly position a Radware OEM solution to a cusomer, Radware is a Tier 2 vendor in this space and miles behind Juniper, F5 and Cisco. The should sell the entire date portfoliio and concentrate on voice only solutions.

  • less

    China, the worlds next Nortel

  • scalpcutter

    Do you really believe the U.S is going to pay back their debt owing to China. Never.
    That is the penalty China will endure for being communist.
    A little payback so to speak but in another way.
    China will not got their money back.
    It's gone.
    On paper they may own somehing but unelss they are living here they own NOTHING.
    You get it boys.
    All china are is an alternative to printing money. Obama decided he would print nearly a trillino on his own.
    Canada can do the same anytime if only McGuinty and Haper had some brains.
    Print money. Pay off peoples debt. Simple. Out of Debt.
    The western world should take care of itself.
    Screw the rest. And you can toss out mexico while we're at it.

  • TongueInCheek

    There's tons of information now available on the US Docket at: http://chapter11.epiqsystems.com/docket/docketl… in Docket # 353.

    The Purchase Price is $17.65 Million but there are a few provisions for inventory value at date of close. Also looks like bids will be accepted until March 19th, and if other bids are received, then an Auction occurs on March 23rd and a final court hearing on March 25th.

  • less

    BUAHAHA!!

    Docket 289:

    Application to Employ Application of the Official Committee of Unsecured Creditors of Nortel Networks Inc., et al. to Retain and Employ Akin Gump

    Gumps woulda fixed it, but everything Nortel comes near turns to fart dust:

    Akin Gump Lays Off 65 Staff
    Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld is laying off 65 staff across its offices, according to firm spokeswoman Sheila Turner. The news was first reported by The Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog.

  • Another_Nortel_Watcher

    If only it were that simple. The problem with defaulting on your loans is that your currency then turns into something worth less than a peso in world markets. All of a sudden necessary imports like oil cost $500 a barrel and must be paid for up front.

  • scalpcutter

    I guess you don't follow world events.
    Investors are flocking to the U.S greenback cause they are printing money. Rich countries can do that.
    Third world countries like mexico and china cannot.
    Meanwhile the looney drops cause harper hasn't gotten the message yet.
    Print money.
    Don't give china anything back.
    We are the west.
    We can do it.

  • broadbandbill

    I agree, and you are not dreaming…–bb

  • Casual_Observer

    Interesting discussion. China and other dollar holders are in a bit of a quandary because they hold so many dollars they can't afford for their reserves to go worthless now more than ever given that their growth is slowing down dramatically and people are headed back to the rural areas because so many factories are closing down. The real problem as I see it, is that no one consumes like the US consumer and so the US consumer drives the global economy. Culturally it is not in China or India's genes to consume this way as they consume about 1/5 per capita of what an average person in the United States consumes. It will be interesting to see what things are like in the next decade. I believe we are at an inflection point where the US consumer will go into saving mode and the global economy will suffer as a result of it.

  • Another_Nortel_Watcher

    In other words, it is one of the jewels in MZ's crown because it has retained more value than Nortel as a whole during his reign.

  • Another_Nortel_Watcher

    Yes indeed, the next decade will be interesting. I don't think the US consumer will voluntarily go into saving mode, but I think we'll see significant tax increases to service the skyrocketing US debt load that will have the same end result.

  • Casual_Observer

    The US consumer has already gone into saving mode. I don't think we'll see the tax increases most people think. Getting out of Iraq will narrow the deficit over the next few years. The Chinese get their payment back in the form of an economy that is supported by the US consumer. If China wants to stop buying US treasuries and start buying more gold at $1000/oz they can but it will only curtail their own growth further as interest rates would rise in the US. The economy will eventually recover once the deficit narrows and the debt load is reduced. Ideally China wants to be paid back with a dollar that is worth more not less.

  • Casual_Observer

    The US consumer has already gone into saving mode. I don't think we'll see the tax increases most people think. Getting out of Iraq will narrow the deficit over the next few years. The Chinese get their payment back in the form of an economy that is supported by the US consumer. If China wants to stop buying US treasuries and start buying more gold at $1000/oz they can but it will only curtail their own growth further as interest rates would rise in the US. The economy will eventually recover once the deficit narrows and the debt load is reduced. Ideally China wants to be paid back with a dollar that is worth more not less.

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