News

posted on 06 March 2008 09:20

Responding to a 67 percent decline in Packeteer's share price over the past year, hedge fund Elliot Associates is trying to take over the company for $5.50 a share, about $200 million.

Packeteer develops and sells wide area network optimisation products, ones used to send files over a WAN. It faces strong competition from Riverbed and Cisco. These companies sell WAN optimisation as part of a wider offering, such as wide area file services, and have good partnership programmes.

Elliot Associates is a quite aggressive institutional investor which has approached Packeteer several times to get the company to be more effective, and thus increase the value of the near ten percent of the company stock the hedge fund owns or controls.

It believes Packeteer's woes are down to poor execution, meaning that the top management team has under-performed. The current management team is:-

- Dave Côté, President and CEO (pictured)
- David C. Yntema, Chief Financial Officer
- Manuel R. Freitas, Vice President, Worldwide Operations and Customer Support
- Ray Smets, Vice President, Worldwide Sales and Marketing
- Nelu Mihai, Vice President, Engineering
- Greg Pappas, Vice President, Human Resources
- Dave Winikoff, Vice President, Product Management

If Elliot Associates gets its way then several of these people might be riding off into the sunset. David Cote must be most at risk.

Packeteer, which has coincidentally just announced a customer win, has said it will evaluate the bid.