Contact: Scott Denne
F5 Networks fires another shot into the security market, buying anti-DDoS company Defense.net. The deal follows the application delivery vendor’s $91m acquisition of antifraud provider Versafe in September 2013.
As it did with Versafe (and most of its acquisitions), F5 is reaching for an early-stage company. Defense.net launched a first product last year and was just beginning to line up customers. Versafe, by comparison, was bought when it was just a $2m business, according to our understanding, and much of that from a partnership with F5.
Though F5 doesn’t break out its security sales in quarterly earnings reports, surveys by TheInfoPro, a service of 451 Research, support the company’s claim that security is a ‘major driver’ of its growth. Overall sales were up 20% year over year last quarter to $420m. In the most recent round of surveys, F5 made its first appearance in several network security categories, including unified threat management and network intrusion detection. Most notably, the company’s ranking in the application-aware firewall category rose to third place in our recent deployment survey, up from fifth a year earlier.
We’ll have a detailed report on this deal in our next 451 Market Insight.
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