Ixia

Company overview. Ixia (formally Ixia, a California corporation, formerly traded on Nasdaq under XXIA) was founded in 1997 and headquartered in Calabasas, California. It operated as an independent public company until April 2017, when Keysight Technologies Inc. (NYSE: KEYS) acquired it for roughly $1.6 billion in cash. Ixia then became Keysight's Ixia Solutions Group (later branded Keysight Network Visibility & Security), effectively a wholly owned division/subsidiary. At acquisition it had about 1,750 employees and reported revenue of roughly $495 million (fiscal 2016), with customers including top network equipment makers and carriers.

Products / services / operations. Ixia was an operating company that designed and sold network testing, visibility, and security equipment and software. Its test platforms simulated wired, Wi-Fi, and 3G/4G/LTE/5G network conditions so network equipment manufacturers, service providers, enterprises, and government agencies could validate device and network performance pre-deployment. Its visibility line included network packet brokers and traffic-monitoring gear, and its security line included products such as the ThreatARMOR and Vision ONE offerings cited in the litigation below.

Patent-litigation posture. Ixia is an operating company cast as a defendant: the case data shows 0 plaintiff appearances and 2 defendant appearances, both from Centripetal Networks, Inc. v. Keysight Technologies, Inc. et al. (filed July 20, 2017, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Norfolk Division — the "rocket docket," not a typical NPE venue like EDTX). The two tracked entries appear to reflect the same underlying suit.

Notable cases / context. In that case, Virginia-based network-security firm Centripetal Networks alleged that Ixia and parent Keysight infringed patents covering automated threat-intelligence and network-security-policy management through the ThreatARMOR, Vision ONE, and Application and Threat Intelligence products. The suit arrived shortly after Keysight closed the Ixia acquisition, folding the dispute into the parent's docket; related IPR proceedings later followed. No independent plaintiff-side assertion activity by Ixia appears in the tracked data.