Sandvine AIMs for IPO

IP traffic management specialist Sandvine Inc. plans to list its shares on the London Stock Exchange 's Alternative Investment Market (AIM) on March 21 in an IPO that should value the company at about £90 million (US$157.5 million).

Although the company didn't include financial details in its listing document with the London institution, the vendor is believed to be aiming to raise around £20 million ($35 million) from the flotation.

Waterloo, Ontario-based Sandvine, which last May raised $15 million and which has raised more than $35 million to date, declined to comment on the impending listing. The company is believed to have taken a loss of $3 million from revenues of $15.8 million in the year to November 30, 2005, according to Canada's National Post. (See Sandvine Secures $15M.)

The company is well known for helping its more than 100 carrier and ISP customers to identify traffic, particularly viruses and bandwidth-hungry P2P traffic, on their networks and enable security and service management policies. (See Sandvine Releases Traffic Stats, Carrier VOIP Leads Study, Sandvine Warns of Threat Within, and Sandvine Wins 2 Cable Customers.)

Why list on London's AIM, though? Sandvine's investor list provides one potential answer: The company's biggest single investor, with a 22.67 percent stake at present, is Celtic House Venture Partners , which is headed up by Sir Terry Matthews. A number of startups backed by Matthews money have listed on AIM in the past two years, including session border controller vendor Newport Networks plc (London: NNG), SIP applications server firm Ubiquity Software Corp. (London: UBQ), and security technology vendor March Networks Corp. . (See We're in the Money and Ubiquity Plans London IPO.)

Sandvine's competitors include Allot Ltd. (Nasdaq: ALLT), Caspian Networks Inc. , and Ellacoya Networks Inc. . Another IP traffic management player, P-Cube, was acquired by Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) in May 2004. (See Cisco Plucks P-Cube for $200M, KT Deploys Caspian, Allot Launches NetXplorer , and Ellacoya Finds Deep Packets Up North .)

— Ray Le Maistre, International News Editor, Light Reading