Emulex

Emulex Corporation provides network connectivity, monitoring and management hardware and software solutions that enable end-to-end application visibility, optimization and acceleration. The company's I/O connectivity offerings, including its line of Ethernet and Fibre Channel-based connectivity products, have been designed into server and storage solutions from OEMs, including Cisco, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, Huawei, IBM, NetApp and Oracle.

In 2013, Emulex acquired Endace, based in New Zealand.

Headquartered in Costa Mesa, California, Emulex was founded in 1978 and employs more than 1200 people worldwide as of 2013.

On April 21, 2009, Broadcom made a proposal to the Emulex board of directors to buy all existing shares of Emulex for $764 million, or $9.25 per share, a 40% premium over the stock's closing price on April 20, 2009. After Emulex's board of directors recommended against the sale, Broadcom increased the company's offer to $11 per share on June 30, which valued the company at $925 million. It too was rejected on July 9, 2009. Subsequently, Broadcom announced it would withdraw its offer. In Feb 2015, it was announced that Avago Technologies Limited had reached an agreement to acquire Emulex Corporation for $8 per share in cash.

Bulletin board system

A bulletin board system, or BBS, is a computer server running custom software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging messages with other users through email, public message boards, and sometimes via direct chatting. Many BBSes also offer on-line games, in which users can compete with each other, and BBSes with multiple phone lines often provide chat rooms, allowing users to interact with each other. Bulletin board systems were in many ways a precursor to the modern form of the World Wide Web, social networks and other aspects of the Internet. Low-cost, high-performance modems drove the use of online services and BBSes through the early 1990s. Infoworld estimated there were 60,000 BBSes serving 17 million users in the United States alone in 1994, a collective market much larger than major online services like CompuServe.