Blue Coat Finally Bags Packeteer

By James Rogers, June 6, 2008, 4:455 PM

Blue Coat has finally plucked Packeteer for acquisition after successfully completing its tender offer last night.

Stockholders of Packeteer have now tendered, exclusive of guaranteed delivery, a total of approximately 29,223,262 Packeteer shares,” said Blue Coat, in a statement earlier today. “Together with 3,559,117 shares already owned by Blue Coat, [this] represents approximately 88.2 percent of the outstanding common shares of Packeteer.”

Last night was the deadline for the second, and final, offering period for Packeteer shares, and means that the WAN optimization specialist is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Blue Coat.

Blue Coat announced the $268 million acquisition a couple of months ago, just a couple of weeks after Packeteer received an unsolicited acquisition proposal from Elliott Associates LP and Elliott International LP.The completion of Blue Coat’s tender offer ends a period of instability for publicly traded Packeteer, which had turned the company into a prime acquisition target. The Cupertino, Calif.-based vendor has been struggling to swallow its own $78 million acquisition of Tacit two years ago and faces stiff competition from Riverbed and Cisco.

Blue Coat is now set to revamp Packeteer’s flagship PacketShaper product line, although the vendor recently promised to keep PacketShaper as a standalone offering.

Blue Coat’s plans also include extending the interoperability between PacketShaper and its own Blue ProxySG family of appliances, as well as potentially building PacketShaper into its own future products.

Despite this tentative product roadmap, Blue Coat has still not given any indication of how long it will sell and support Packeteer’s offerings as standalone products, nor has the vendor laid out its specific plans for the WAN optimization specialist’s 500-strong workforce.

Have a comment on this story? Please click "Discuss" below. If you'd like to contact Byte and Switch's editors directly, send us a message.