Did You Know?

Mistletoe or "the golden bough" was held sacred by both the Celtic Druids and the Norseman. Once called "Allheal," it was used in folk medicine to cure many ills.

If enemies met by chance beneath mistletoe in a forest, they laid down their arms and maintained a truce until the next day.

In parts of England and Wales farmers would give the Christmas bunch of mistletoe to the first cow that calved in the New Year. This was thought to bring good luck to the entire herd.

Vikings dating back to the eighth century believed that mistletoe had the power to raise humans from the dead, relating to the resurrection of Balder, the god of the summer sun.

In the first century, the Druids in Britain believed that mistletoe could perform miracles. Mistletoe was used by the Druid priesthood in a very special ceremony held five days after the New Moon following winter solstice. The Druid priests would cut mistletoe from a holy oak tree with a golden sickle. The branches had to be caught before they touched the ground. The priests then divided the branches into many sprigs and distributed them to the people, who hung them over doorways as protection against thunder, lightning and other evils.

Back in 2002, the industry witnessed the growth of the Internet and Intranet. More services were being offered on the Internet, and there was a convergence of applications – a triple play of voice, video, data and related applications. Switching and routing networking gear was rapidly increasing in speed from Fast Ethernet to Gigabit and ten Gigabit speeds, while prices for the networking gear were rapidly coming down.

Everything looked great, until you realized that there were no attractive solutions to provide higher levels of intelligence, such as for Layer 4-7 networking processing. Gigabit speed VPN firewalls were outrageously expensive, and cost-effective SMB VPN firewalls for the small and medium enterprise offered virtually no features and only a couple of Megabits per second of performance. Intelligent load-balancers that processed data at the Layer 4-7 level, security appliances that would track files or check for viruses, and numerous other appliances, all offered limited performance and functionality at very high prices. These appliances did not – could not! – keep up with the industry, and the founders of Mistletoe Technologies figured out why and how to change that.

Prior to Mistletoe Technologies, virtually all Internet applications were run on general purpose processors that had simply integrated a networking interface such as Ethernet. However, speeds of the network had seriously outpaced the general purpose processors. Simply increasing the core speed by 20% did not increase the performance of the box by the orders of magnitude desired. Multi-core general purpose processors still were at heart a general purpose processor ill-suited for networking applications. As the networking speeds increased, the limitations of general purpose processor architectures became more apparent.

Mistletoe Technologies set out with a very straightforward mission: create silicon solutions optimized for Internet applications processing. Such an architecture would reduce the cost of providing security, management, and quality of service; increase reliability, functionality, and network speeds; and also improve security. "Direct-execution processing," applied with a set of novel engineering innovations, held the promise.

Just before Christmas in 2002 we moved into a venture incubator in Palo Alto. We have come a long way since then, bringing to market the industry’s first multi-Gigabit Internet application processing silicon family. Along the way, we have built up a healthy and expanding family of products, intellectual property, and satisfied customers and end-users who understand and tout the benefits of our technology.

We are looking forward to a prosperous 2007 and sharing more of our news as we start off the New Year by exhibiting at RSA in San Francisco the week of February 5 - 9. Be sure to visit us if you are in town!