SynOptics Communications, Inc., was a Santa Clara, California-based early computer network equipment vendor from 1985 until 1994.

[1] SynOptics Communications was founded in 1985 by Andrew K. Ludwick[2] and Ronald V. Schmidt, both of whom worked at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).

[3] Despite intense competition that drove down prices, Synoptics' annual revenue grew to a high of $700 million in 1993.

To move away from the rapidly commoditizing Layer 1/2 Ethernet equipment market and grow their market share in the increasingly lucrative and more profitable Layer 3 networking arena, SynOptics merged with Billerica, Massachusetts based Wellfleet Communications on July 6, 1994, in a US$ 2.7 Billion dollar deal to form Bay Networks.

[4][5] SynOptics headquarters at the time of the merger with Wellfleet was in the pair of strikingly-designed sloped buildings [6] at the Northeast corner of the intersection of California's Great America Parkway and Mission College Blvd in Santa Clara, an area known for featuring numerous networking start-ups such as Ungermann-Bass.