Nortel’s Alteon deal with Radware worth pennies on the dollar

And you thought you were underwater with your mortgage?

Back in 2000 Nortel bought application delivery switching vendor Alteon for about $6 billion in an effort to keep pace with rival Cisco. Nine years later, Nortel is bankrupt and it is trying to sell off assets as it restructures itself. Nortel announced last week that Radware was buying the asseets of the Alteon business, but neither company announced the value of the deal. Today the Ottawa Citizen published the numbers, based on a filing in U.S. bankruptcy court.  Radware will pay Nortel around $17.5 million. That’s less than 3% of what Nortel originally paid for the company.