Riverbed Acquires 2 Companies: Zeus Tech. and Aptimize

Riverbed Technology announced the acquisition of 2 companies to form the cornerstone of a new asymmetric optimization strategy.


Zeus Technology delivers high-performance software-based load balancing and traffic management solutions for virtual and cloud environments. The technology frees applications from the constraints of proprietary hardware-based load balancers, enabling them to run in any physical, virtual or cloud environment, and to migrate and scale on-demand. The company says its solutions help power the web presence of the BBC, BT, Comic Relief, Domino's Pizza, Gilt Groupe, ITV, PLAY.COM, See Tickets, STA Travel and Virgin Media. Zeus is based in Cambridge, U.K.


Riverbed will pay approximately $110 million in cash for the securities of Zeus and up to an additional $30 million in cash based on the achievement of certain bookings targets in a defined twelve month period following the closing. The acquisition is expected to be approximately breakeven to Riverbed earnings in the second half of 2011 and accretive beginning in 2012.


Aptimize Limited specializes in web content optimization. The company's software helps to reduce web page complexity, enabling significantly faster page downloads. The Aptimize Website Accelerator eliminates massive inefficiencies in modern web applications by effectively transforming the content (javascript, cascading style sheets, images, etc.) in real time—instantly accelerating websites or intranets with a simple software installation on the Web server. Specifically, Aptimize Website Accelerator (WAX) is an ISAPI filter for Microsoft IIS, or a Daemon module for Linux Apache. The company is based in Wellington, New Zealand. Financial terms were not disclosed.


"Riverbed is the performance company," said Jerry Kennelly, president and CEO at Riverbed. "Our goal is to have the broadest and best portfolio of performance optimization products to solve a range of customer performance problems. The acquisition of Zeus is a perfect fit with that strategy. The Zeus solutions are designed for how people want to architect their applications now—high-performance software for cloud environments." http://www.riverbed.com http://www.zeus.com