F5 Networks completed its previously announced acquisition of Volterra, which offers a universal edge-as-a-service platform.
“I am incredibly excited to welcome Volterra to the F5 family and get to work bringing Edge 2.0—a key part of our Adaptive Applications vision—to customers,” said François Locoh-Donou, F5 President and CEO. “Joining forces, we will deliver the enterprise-grade features, including world-class security and scale, that have been missing from the edge until now.”
“Current edge approaches were not designed with enterprises in mind,” said Ankur Singla, founder of Volterra. “When Harshad and I started Volterra, we knew the edge would need to be delivered with the scale of public clouds, but with management and security integrated with the data centers where so many enterprise apps still live. Given F5’s leadership in Adaptive Applications and their vast enterprise customer base, I could not imagine a better partner to empower customers’ business transformation through modern apps.”
F5 to acquire Volterra for its open edge platform
F5 Networks agreed to acquire Volterra, a start-up developing a universal edge-as-a-service platform, for approximately $440 million in cash and approximately $60 million in deferred consideration and assumed unvested incentive compensation to founders and employees.
F5 said the addition of Volterra will give it an edge platform built for enterprises and service providers that will be security-first and app-driven with unlimited scale.
Volterra, which is based in Santa Clara, California, offers a distributed cloud service for deploying and managing applications at the edge. The cloud-native environment can be deployed across multiple public clouds and edge sites.
- Volterra is headed by Ankur Singla, Founder & CEO, who previously was the founder and CEO of Contrail Systems, a pioneer in telco NFV and SDN technologies that was acquired by Juniper Networks in 2012. Prior to Contrail, Ankur was the CTO and VP Engineering at Aruba Networks, a global leader in wireless solutions.
Volterra unveils distributed cloud platform for apps
Volterra, a start-up based in Santa Clara, California, emerged from stealth to unveil its distributed cloud platform for deploying and managing applications. The SaaS-based offering integrates a broad range of services that have normally been siloed across many point products and network or cloud providers.
Volterra has raised over $50 million in funding to date from Khosla Ventures, Mayfield and M12 (Microsoft’s venture fund), as well as a growing set of strategic investors/partners including Itochu Technology Ventures and Samsung NEXT. Volterra said it now has 100+ engineers and 30+ global customers.
The cloud-native environment can be deployed across multiple public clouds and edge sites. Key capabilities include:
- Fleet-wide management of distributed applications and data across heterogeneous infrastructure
- Globally distributed control plane with Kubernetes APIs for application orchestration and multi-layer security for workloads and data
- Comprehensive compute, storage, networking and security for distributed edge locations
- Secure, high-performance global connectivity across edge sites, private clouds and multi-cloud
Key elements of the offering are:
- VoltStack deploys and manages distributed applications across multiple clouds or edge sites using industry standard Kubernetes APIs
- VoltMesh delivers high performance networking and zero-trust security between multiple clouds and edge sites
- Volterra Console is a management console for deploying and operating distributed applications at a global scale with centralized control and observability
