Brocade agreed to acquire Riverbed’s SteelApp product line (formerly called Stingray) in an all-cash asset transaction. The deal includes all of the assets of the SteelApp business unit, and SteelApp development and field personnel. Financial terms were not disclosed.
SteelApp is a virtual application delivery controller (ADC) providing scalable, secure, and elastic delivery of enterprise, cloud, and e-commerce applications. The SteelApp product line controls traffic to and from applications and enables fast, reliable, and secure application delivery to users anywhere from the cloud or data center. The latest release of SteelApp 9.9 supports advanced global load balancing including to AWS.
Brocade said it expects ADCs to become one of the first applications to benefit from NFV. ADCs provide application availability, acceleration, and security for users. This includes shielding them from interruptions due to bursts in demand, providing various optimizations based on application type, and facilitating access based upon specific policies. Deploying this functionality in software (vADCs) enables a dramatically better level of flexibility and cost, and aligns directly with Brocade’s NFV strategy. Brocade’s growing portfolio of software networking products already includes virtual routing, firewall, VPN, SDN controller, and network visibility and analytics.
“Brocade continues to execute aggressively to capitalize on the disruptive force of software in IP networking,” said Lloyd Carney, CEO of Brocade. “Brocade is the #2 data center networking vendor worldwide and this acquisition strengthens Brocade’s unique position as the adoption of software-centric networking is accelerating. We are thrilled to add SteelApp’s widely-adopted solution to our portfolio and will invest our existing ADC resources to aggressively advance the roadmap and extend it into our open Vyatta Platform offering for NFV and SDN.”
“The decision to divest the SteelApp product line reflects Riverbed’s ongoing commitment to focus on businesses and opportunities that leverage our core competencies,” said Jerry M. Kennelly, chairman and CEO of Riverbed Technology. “Riverbed is focused on providing solutions that provide CIOs unparalleled visibility, optimization, and control in the hybrid enterprise, ensuring on-premises, cloud and SaaS applications perform as needed.”
http://www.riverbed.com/products/application-delivery-performance/
- Brocade has made two previous acquisitions of virtualized networking companies: Vyatta (virtual routing and firewall) and Vistapointe (virtual network visibility and analytics).
- In December, Riverbed announced a privatization deal with Thoma Bravo, LLC and Teachers’ Private Capital, the private investor department of Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan. Riverbed stockholders will receive $21.00 per share in cash, or a total of approximately $3.6 billion.
