Zeus Technology, Ltd. is a software company based in Cambridge, UK. Zeus Technology, Inc. is a wholly owned US subsidiary.
Zeus' original product was Zeus Web Server which currently (2006) is one of the highest-performance web servers for Unix and Unix-like platforms. Zeus Web Server is the software of choice for the majority of participants in the SPECWEB benchmarks.
In 2004, Zeus released ZXTM Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager, a software load balancer for TCP and UDP based network protocols.
2006 saw the release of version 4.1 of ZXTM with a series of new features including the new ZXTM 7400 Appliance which can handle more than 9400 SSL Transactions per second, twice that of the ZXTM 7000 it replaces. Other features added then include: Request Rate Shaping, Chunking, Specific Connection Routing and an increase in Fluent Business Logic.
In April 2008, Zeus released ZXTM version 5.0, with Java(TM) Extensions and SIP and RTSP capabilities, as well as IPv6 support. ZXTM is a software alternative to F5's BigIP appliance line or Citrix NetScaler. ZXTM can be deployed on any server and runs in Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, and as a virtual appliance in VMware ESX Server or Windows. ZXTM is also available as an appliance running on Sun Microsystems hardware; either Sun Fire X2200 or Sun Fire X4100.
History
Zeus Technology was founded in 1995 by Damian Reeves and Adam Twiss, while they were undergraduates at Churchill College, University of Cambridge.
The company grew rapidly during the excesses of the Dot-com boom. Zeus Technology was nominated one of the top 50 most important privately held companies in the world by Red Herring (2000/06) and one of the Top 100 Emerging Technology Companies by Tornado Insider (2001/05). A public flotation was anticipated (BBC News article), but Zeus Technology remains privately held.
During 2001 and 2002, almost 3% of the world's websites ran on Zeus Web Server Netcraft Reports. For much of 2003, Zeus Web Server was the third most popular webserver (after Apache and Microsoft IIS) (April 2003 Netcraft survey).
As competitors matured and Windows NT platforms became more commonplace in the web serving environment, Zeus Web Server's share shrank significantly. In April 2006, the Netcraft survey indicated that Zeus Web Server held approximately 0.7% market share.
In 2004 Zeus Technology released Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager (ZXTM), based on Zeus' earlier Zeus Load Balancer product. ZXTM (Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager) manages application traffic, inspecting, transforming and routing requests as it load-balances them across the application infrastructure. ZXTM's TrafficScript engine enables users to implement whatever traffic management policies are most appropriate, drawing on the whole range of capabilities of ZXTM. With ZXTM version 5.0, Java Extensions can now be used to implement additional, complex traffic transformations and other policies.
Trivia
ApacheBench, the benchmarking tool bundled with Apache HTTP Server, was originally written by Adam Twiss and donated to the Apache Group:
This is ApacheBench, Version 2.0.41-dev <$Revision: 1.141 $> apache-2.0
Copyright (c) 1996 Adam Twiss, Zeus Technology Ltd, http://www.zeustech.net/
Copyright (c) 1998-2002 The Apache Software Foundation, http://www.apache.org/
