Mazu Networks

About Mazu Networks

Mazu Networks Inc. was a network behavior and performance analytics company founded in 2000 by Paul Hsiao and Sulu Mamdani. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based firm specialized in software and appliances that provided organizations with detailed visibility into their network traffic. Its core technology focused on analyzing the interactions and dependencies between users, applications, and systems to give a holistic, real-time view of application performance.

The company's product line, which included the Cascade portfolio, was designed to help IT organizations manage, secure, and optimize the availability of business-critical applications across wide area networks (WANs). Mazu Profiler, a key offering, provided network behavior analysis, user identification, and application fingerprinting. This allowed clients, primarily enterprises and service providers, to conduct capacity planning, diagnose performance issues, and ensure security. The system functioned by capturing and analyzing network traffic to map application dependencies, a crucial function for understanding complex IT environments. By 2008, the company had approximately 200 enterprise customers and recorded around $16 million in bookings.

After raising a total of $19 million in funding over two rounds from investors including Benchmark, Matrix, and Greylock, Mazu Networks positioned itself as a significant player in the application performance monitoring space. The company's trajectory culminated in its acquisition by Riverbed Technology in January 2009 for approximately $25 million in cash, with potential for an additional $22 million based on future sales performance. The acquisition was a strategic move for Riverbed to integrate Mazu's analysis and reporting capabilities with its own WAN optimization solutions, creating a closed-loop system for monitoring and managing enterprise-wide applications. Following the acquisition, the Mazu organization became a business unit within Riverbed, and its products were integrated and rebranded, eventually becoming part of the Riverbed SteelCentral suite.