Zeus Technology, Ltd. was a software company founded in 1995 and based in

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a List of cities in the United Kingdom, city and non-metropolitan district in the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It is the county town of Cambridgeshire and is located on the River Cam, north of London. As of the 2021 Unit ...

England England is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is located on the island of Great Britain, of which it covers about 62%, and List of islands of England, more than 100 smaller adjacent islands. It ...

, known for its

web server A web server is computer software and underlying Computer hardware, hardware that accepts requests via Hypertext Transfer Protocol, HTTP (the network protocol created to distribute web content) or its secure variant HTTPS. A user agent, co ...

. In July 2011, Zeus Technology was acquired by

Riverbed Technology Riverbed Technology LLC is an American information technology company. Its products consist of software and hardware focused on Unified Observability, Network Visibility, End User Experience Management, Network monitoring, network performance mon ...

. In March 2015, Riverbed Technology sold the SteelApp business unit to

Brocade Communications Systems Brocade Communications Systems, Inc., was an American technology company specializing in storage networking products, now a subsidiary of Broadcom Inc. The company is known for its Fibre Channel storage networking products and technology. Prio ...

. In June 2017, Brocade Communications Systems sold the vADC business unit to Pulse Secure. In December 2020 Pulse Secure, including the vADC business unit, was acquired by Ivanti.

History

Zeus Technology was founded in 1995 by Damian Reeves and Adam Twiss while they were undergraduates at

Churchill College Churchill College is a Colleges of the University of Cambridge, constituent college of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England. It has a primary focus on science, engineering and technology, but retains a strong interest in the arts ...

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...

. The company grew rapidly during the excesses of the

Dot-com boom The dot-com bubble (or dot-com boom) was a stock market bubble that ballooned during the late-1990s and peaked on Friday, March 10, 2000. This period of market growth coincided with the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web and the Intern ...

. In June 2000 Zeus Technology was nominated one of the top 50 most important privately held companies in the world by

Red Herring A red herring is something that misleads or distracts from a relevant or important question. It may be either a logical fallacy or a literary device that leads readers or audiences toward a false conclusion. A red herring may be used intentiona ...

and one of the Top 100 Emerging Technology Companies by Tornado Insider in May 2001. A public flotation was anticipated but Zeus Technology remained privately held until its 2011 acquisition. During 2001 and 2002, almost 3% of the world's websites ran on Zeus Web Server. For much of 2003, Zeus Web Server was the third most popular web server (after

Apache The Apache ( ) are several Southern Athabaskan language-speaking peoples of the Southwestern United States, Southwest, the Southern Plains and Northern Mexico. They are linguistically related to the Navajo. They migrated from the Athabascan ho ...

and

Microsoft IIS Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Services, IIS, 2S) is an extensible web server created by Microsoft for use with the Windows NT family. IIS supports HTTP, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, SMTP and NNTP. It has been an integral part of th ...

). As competitors matured and

Windows NT Windows NT is a Proprietary software, proprietary Graphical user interface, graphical operating system produced by Microsoft as part of its Windows product line, the first version of which, Windows NT 3.1, was released on July 27, 1993. Original ...

platforms became more commonplace in the web serving environment, Zeus Web Server's share shrank significantly. In April 2006, the Zeus Web Server held approximately 0.7% market share. In June 2011, Zeus acquired Art of Defence, a Bavarian software company founded in 2005 that develops a distributed

Web Application Firewall A web application firewall (WAF) is a specific form of application firewall that filters, monitors, and blocks HTTP traffic to and from a web service. By inspecting HTTP traffic, it can prevent attacks exploiting a web application's known vulne ...

called hyperguard. In July 2011, Zeus Technology was acquired by Riverbed Technology for $110m. In March 2015, Riverbed Technology sold the SteelApp business unit to

. In June 2017, Brocade Communications Systems sold the vADC business unit to Pulse Secure. In December 2020 Pulse Secure, including the vADC business unit, was acquired by Ivanti.

Product

Zeus' original product, first released in 1995, was

Zeus Web Server Zeus Web Server is a discontinued proprietary high-performance web server for Unix and Unix-like platforms (including Solaris, FreeBSD, HP-UX and Linux). It was developed by Zeus Technology, a software company located in Cambridge, England ...

which became known as one of the highest-performance

s for

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

and

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X, *nix or *NIX) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Uni ...

platforms. In 2004 Zeus Technology released Zeus Traffic Manager (originally 'Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager', ZXTM), based on Zeus' earlier ''Zeus Load Balancer'' product, a software

load balancer In computing, load balancing is the process of distributing a set of tasks over a set of resources ''Resource'' refers to all the materials available in our environment which are Technology, technologically accessible, Economics, economically ...

for TCP and UDP based network protocols. Traffic Manager managed application traffic, inspecting, transforming and routing requests across the application infrastructure. Zeus's TrafficScript engine enabled users to implement whatever traffic management policies were most appropriate. The product was marketed by Riverbed as SteelApp, having earlier been known as Stingray Traffic Manager. In 2005, 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, and later discontinued the production of hardware appliances of this sort. 2006 saw the release of Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager Virtual Appliance, announced to coincide with the launch of VMware's Virtual Appliance Marketplace. 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 renaming from 'ZXTM' to 'Zeus Traffic Manager'. ApacheBench, the benchmarking tool bundled with

Apache HTTP Server The Apache HTTP Server ( ) is a free and open-source software, free and open-source cross-platform web server, released under the terms of Apache License, Apache License 2.0. It is developed and maintained by a community of developers under the ...

, was originally written by Adam Twiss and donated to the Apache Group.

References

{{reflist Defunct software companies of the United Kingdom Software companies established in 1995 Companies based in Cambridge