Ixia agreed to acquire BreakingPoint Systems, which specializes in security testing, for $160 million in cash.
BreakingPoint’s Actionable Security Intelligence (ASI) provides global visibility into emerging threats, and actionable insight to harden and maintain resilient defenses. BreakingPoint’s FireStorm appliances simulates hundreds of stateful applications and provides the ultimate application control necessary to stress deep packet inspection (DPI) devices. The 3-slot BreakingPoint FireStorm can create 90 million simultaneous wired and wireless users at live network speeds of up to 120 Gbps.
The company’s platforms are kept current via an intelligence subscription service that regularly pushes newly discovered attacks, malware, and other intelligence aggregated from proprietary research, strategic customer relationships, and carrier feeds.
BreakingPoint is based in Austin, Texas.
Ixia said the acquisition enables it to provide an end-to-end solution that monitors, tests, and optimizes converged networks.
The company’s noted that BreakingPoint grew revenue over 40 percent in calendar 2011 to $33.5 million while generating gross margin of 87 percent for the year. For calendar 2012, Ixia expects BreakingPoint’s revenue to again grow by more than 40 percent, and anticipates that the BreakingPoint transaction will be accretive to non-GAAP earnings in the first full quarter of operations after the acquisition closes. Non-GAAP earnings exclude stock-based compensation, amortization of acquired intangible assets, and other non-recurring charges, net of the applicable tax effects.
“As a leader in cyber security research, BreakingPoint has built a library of more than 34,000 attacks, exploits, malware, and more,” said Dennis Cox, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of BreakingPoint. “Joining forces with Ixia creates a powerful platform in security and application testing – one with an extensive global sales reach into enterprises, service providers, and government agencies.”
Ixia also updated its revenue guidance for the second quarter of 2012 to a range of $87 million to $89 million for its core business. This compares to the previously stated guidance of $86 million to $89 million. In addition to this amount, Ixia expects its recent Anue Systems, Inc. acquisition to add approximately $3 million to $4 million in additional revenue in the second quarter for the period from the June 1, 2012 acquisition closing date to June 30, 2012.
http://www.breakingpointsystems.com/
Some other recent acquisitions of testing firms:
- In May 2012, Ixia agreed to acquire Anue Systems, which offers a network monitoring solutions, for $145 million in cash. Anue Systems offers a Net Tool Optimizer that provides traffic visibility for Service Providers and enterprises by enabling test tools to access taps across the network. Anue aggregates and filters network traffic to optimize network monitoring tool usage. Anue also can replicate network traffic from a single tap or SPAN port and send it to multiple monitoring tools simultaneously. The company was founded in 2002 and is based in Austin, Texas.
- In April 2012, Danaher Corporation agreed to acquire VSS Monitoring, a privately-held company based in San Mateo, California, for its distributed traffic capture system for network and security monitoring. The company’s Distributed Traffic Capture Systems provide an intelligent and robust platform for centralized monitoring, tool optimization, and scalability for the network monitoring and security infrastructure. VSS Monitoring optimizes the way data is extracted from high speed networks and then intelligently groomed and distributed to the eco-system of tools that require this data. Financial terms were not disclosed.
- In April 2012, Spirent Communications agreed to acquire Mu Dynamics, which offers a network security and application performance testing tools, for $40.0 million in cash. Mu Studio, the company’s flag ship product line, enables performance and security testing of cloud infrastructure, including network security systems, deep packet inspection (DPI) solutions, and LTE networks. Its Blitz is a self-service load and performance testing solution for cloud applications. Mu TestCloud compiles thousands of ready-to-runs tests, covering hundreds of applications.
- In 2011, Ixia acquired VeriWave, a performance testing company for wireless LAN (WLAN) and Wi-Fi enabled smart devices, for an undisclosed sum. VeriWave wireless test solutions validate Wi-Fi networks, smart devices, and applications by benchmarking and measuring speed, quality, interoperability, compliance, and other pivotal aspects of wireless performance.