Bandwidth management start up Packeteer Inc is opening up shop in Europe in its bid to grow the company in advance of an planned Initial Public Offering in the US mid way through the year. The Campbell, California 1995 start up, has opened European Headquarters in the Netherlands, and appointed a European director, Arnold Pijpers. The company plans to triple or quadruple revenues, which it claims are currently around $5m a year, and achieve profitability by the second quarter, with an IPO in mid year if the market conditions are suitable. Company VP marketing Bob Quillan claims that Packeteer isn’t threatened by the big players side-stepping it with their own products, because it is exclusively adding features higher up in the network layers, not by queuing traffic at the router, but by reserving channels for data flow. The company has also set out its plans for its future direction, and says it is going to work on mapping various types of IP traffic onto different classes of Asynchronous Transfer Mode traffic, as ATM is rapidly increasing in popularity for WAN connections. Packeteer launched its first PacketShaper product last July: a server placed in front of the router costing between $3,450 and $7,250. In the near term the company will be shipping a software upgrade to its products on 1 March, adding support for the ITU H.323 multimedia standard. The company says that now its users will be able to assign reserved bandwidth to voice and video signals transferred across the WAN, to enable toll quality IP voice.

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