Banyan
Technology bigotry has served us well. It's given us a cause to champion, technology that's often superior, and something to hold over the heads of Microsoft and other big players. At one time, it was Apple and Banyan; today, it's Apple and Linux.
Banyan's story is remarkable in that the company may truly have been ahead of its time (unlike those companies that just claim to be ahead of their time). Founded in 1983 by former Data General exec David Mahoney and his cohorts, Banyan, like many other high-tech vendors, started life as a hardware and OS player. Indeed, company officials claim Banyan's was the first network operating system and directory service around. Its Vines NOS eventually competed with Novell NetWare, 3Com 3+ LAN and Microsoft LAN Manager, among others. But its real legacy was StreetTalk, a directory service extraordinaire copied by both Microsoft and Novell to even greater commercial success. Banyan's roots are still alive and well in ePresence, a service company now being purchased by Unisys.
Banyan went public in 1992, but then struggled in creating a market that got Microsoft's and Novell's competitive juices flowing. It purchased Beyond Inc. in 1994 for the BeyondMail product line, to diversify its offerings. But unlike Microsoft and Novell, Banyan failed to market itself broadly and develop a solid channel strategy.
In 1997, Bill Ferry replaced Mahoney as CEO and began to engineer a turnaround. Banyan bartered its technology for equity stakes in several pre-IPO companies. It also began to transform itself into a services company geared around its core assets: technology, customer loyalty and a host of directory consultants. By 1999, it was armed with plenty of cash and talent. In 2000, it took online directory Switchboard.com public, adding even more black ink to the balance sheet.
As the whiz kids of the dot-com era introduced full-service firms like Razorfish, Scient and Viant, says ePresence senior VP and general manager Scott Silk, Banyan was forced to re-evaluate and refocus on its core strength: directories. EPresence began to focus on consulting, managed services and integration around that technology. The Banyan products were phased out.
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