Alteon Networks was founded in 1996 by Mark Bryers, John Hayes, Ted Schroeder and Wayne Hathaway.

[2] Alteon introduced innovative products such as the ACEswitch 180, which was the first network switch to deliver Ethernet with selectable speed, 10/100 or 1000 Mbit/s, on every port via autonegotiation.

Their ACEdirector Layer 4-7 switch was designed as an integrated services front-end and server load balancer.

[3] In addition to server switches, Alteon produced the first network interface controller (NIC) in 1997 that used Gigabit Ethernet (demonstrated at the Networld + Interop trade show in September 1996).

[8] On February 22, 2009 Nortel Networks announced they would sell the Alteon application switching line to Radware, for $17.65 million.