Monday, December 2, 2013

Akamai to Acquire Prolexic for Cloud-based DDoS Control

Akamai agreed to acquire Prolexic, a start-up based in Hollywood, Florida, for a net cash payment of approximately $370 million.

Prolexic offers a FIPS 140-2 SSL/TLS Layer 7 DDoS detection, monitoring and analysis solution for protecting data centers and enterprise IP applications from attacks.  Prolexic operates a DDoS "scrubbing center" in Ashburn, Virginia and San Jose, California as well as other facilities in London and Hong Kong.  The company says its solution was used to mitigate the largest Gbps attack faced to date (167 Gbps), as well as the world’s most powerful attack campaign (144 million packets per second). Its customers include some of the world’s largest banks and the leading companies in e-Commerce, SaaS, payment processing, travel/hospitality, gaming, energy and other at-risk industries. The company has previously disclosed global partnerships with HP, Level 3, BT, NTT and Datacraft.

"By joining forces with Prolexic, we intend to combine Akamai’s leading security and performance platform with Prolexic’s highly-regarded DDoS mitigation solutions for data center and enterprise applications protection. We believe that Prolexic’s solutions and team will help us achieve our goal of making the Internet fast, reliable, and secure," stated Tom Leighton, CEO of Akamai.

http://www.akamai.com/html/about/press/releases/2013/press_120213.html
http://www.prolexic.com


  • In July 2013, Prolexic closed a US$30 million Series C funding round led by new investors Trident Capital and Intel Capital. Prolexic’s existing shareholders include Kennet Partners, Camden Partners and Medina Capital.  The company said it planned to use the new funding to expand its worldwide scrubbing center footprint, increasing the capacity of its cloud-based DDoS mitigation platform beyond 1 Tbps, and to develop new cloud-based security services. 
  • Prolexic is headed by Scott Hammack, who previously served as CEO of e-dmz, which was acquired by Quest Software in 2011. Previously, he has served as CEO of Cyberguard Corporation, which was acquired by Secure Computing in 2004, and CEO of MasterChart, Inc., which was purchased by Allscripts in 2001.
  • Prolexic was founded in 2003.