Infrastructure News Roundup: 21ViaNet Acquires FastWeb, Akamai Acquires FastSoft, Allot Acquires Oversi Networks
Over the past few weeks, there’s been some acquisitions in the infrastructure space that I didn’t get to blog about. None of them are game-changers or dramatically change the landscape for those who offer distribution services, but they are interesting ones to watch with regards to how their technology will be integrated into the larger content delivery ecosystem.
- 21ViaNet acquires FastWeb: Last week, Chinese web hosting service provider 21ViaNet announced they had acquired FastWeb, a China based content delivery network. 21ViaNet is one of China’s largest carrier-neutral Internet data center service providers, with more than 150 POPs in the country, yet they didn’t have any kind of CDN offering. So on paper, acquiring FastWeb makes a lot of sense and the company says they plan to use FastWeb’s CDN services to “diversify” revenue and improve the quality and reliability of their services. Terms of the deal were not disclosed and I haven’t heard any rumors on the evaluation.
- Akamai acquires FastSoft: Two weeks ago, Akamai announced they had acquired FastSoft, a six year old company that was offering network optimization technology originally developed at the California Institute of Technology and funded by the National Science Foundation, DARPA and Cisco. While FastSoft didn’t get too much mention in the media, their software did good job at accelerating web pages and web applications and customers I have spoken with always raved about how well it worked. While FastSoft offered acceleration services for video, applications, software downloads and small objects, most of the revenue didn’t come from accelerating video content, but Akamai has said that’s where they plan to use the technology within their network, at least to start. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the price that keeps been talked about in the industry is that it was a sub-$100M acquisition for Akamai. If I remember correctly, FastSoft had raised about $6M in funding. I’ll update this post if I can confirm the acquisition price from a reliable source.
- Allot Communications acquires Oversi Networks: Last month, Allot Communications announced they had acquired another Israel based company, transparent caching provider Oversi Networks for $16M in cash. The company said Oversi will add about $2M a quarter in revenue and it expects the business to reach break-even by the first quarter of 2013. Allot plans to integrate Oversi’s transparent caching technology into their deep packet inspection (DPI) offering. Oversi had raised at least $13M in funding and had been shopping themselves on the market for over a year, so the sale is pretty much a wash for investors. It’s also interesting to note that Cisco was a shareholder in Oversi, yet Cisco didn’t bid on buying the company and recently partnered with transparent caching provider PeerApp instead.
For an updated list of content delivery and transparent caching vendors in the market please visit www.cdnlist.com