Monday, November 27, 2017

Zayo to acquire Spread Networks for $127 million

Zayo agreed to acquire Spread Networks for $127 million in cash.

Spread Networks is a privately-owned telecommunications provider that owns and operates a 825-mile, high-fiber count long-haul route connecting New York and Chicago. The company currently serves more than 60 customers. Of the 432 fibers available on the route, less than 25 percent are utilized today and the acquisition provides Zayo with overpull rights and additional conduit. The route connects 755 Secaucus Rd. in Secaucus, NJ and 1400 Federal Blvd. in Carteret, NJ to 350 Cermak Rd. in Chicago, IL, with additional connectivity enabled by Zayo’s existing network.

Zayo said the deal provides it with the lowest latency and most direct fiber route between New York and Chicago and additional physical path diversity. Zayo will use the acquired assets to provide a low-latency wavelength route from Seattle to New York.

“Spread constructed this route to provide the fastest possible speed on the shortest possible route,” said Jack Waters, CTO and president of Fiber Solutions at Zayo. “This asset is an outstanding complement to our existing network, providing customers with low-latency options to and from the country’s leading centers of finance and commerce. Given the relative simplicity of the business, this will be a straightforward integration with meaningful, near-term synergies.”

Spread Networks Cuts Chicago-New York Latency to 12.98 Milliseconds Roundtrip

Spread Networks  announced further performance improvements on its low-latency Chicago-to-NYC fiber route. Spread's flagship Ultra Low Latency Chicago-New York Dark Fiber service is now operational at a roundtrip latency of 12.98 milliseconds roundtrip, a 100 microsecond improvement from Spread's previous 13.1 millisecond offering.  

Spread's Ultra Low Latency Chicago-New York Wavelength service promises operational round-trip latency between Chicago and New York below 14.1 milliseconds roundtrip when it becomes operational on October 12th.  Spread said these latency improvements to the ULL Wavelength service follow up immediately upon its recent deployment of 100G technology on the same ULL Wavelength service. 

Thoma Bravo to privatize Barracuda Networks for $1.6B

Thoma Bravo, a leading private equity firm, will acquire all shares of Barracuda Networks (NYSE: CUDA) in an all-cash transaction valued at $1.6 billion. Barracuda shareholders will receive $27.55 in cash for each share of Barracuda common stock they hold. The price represents a premium of 22.5 percent to the company's 10-day average stock price prior to Nov. 27, 2017, of $22.49.

Barracuda supplies appliance and cloud-enabled solutions for data protection.

"We believe the proposed transaction offers an opportunity for us to accelerate our growth with our industry-leading security platform that's purpose-built for highly distributed, diverse cloud and hybrid environments. We will continue Barracuda's tradition of delivering easy-to-use, full-featured solutions that can be deployed in the way that makes sense for our customers," said BJ Jenkins, chief executive officer of Barracuda. "Thoma Bravo has an excellent history of investing in growing security businesses, and this transaction speaks to the value and strength of Barracuda's security platform, which helps customers protect and manage their networks, applications, and data. I expect that our employees, customers, and partners will benefit from this partnership."

"Barracuda is a proven industry leader, consistently bringing powerful, comprehensive solutions to customers in an increasingly prevalent, hostile, and complex threat environment," said Seth Boro, a managing partner at Thoma Bravo. "We believe that Barracuda is at the forefront of innovation in several highly strategic areas of the cybersecurity market and are excited to be the company's partner in the next phase of its growth."

Thoma Bravo to Acquire Majority Stake in DigiCert


Thoma Bravo, a leading private equity investment firm, agreed to acquire a majority interest in DigiCert from TA Associates, another private equity firm currently holding the majority share. Financial terms were not disclosed. DigiCert is a global SSL Certificate Authority (CA) and the leading provider of trusted certificate management solutions.  The company provides its digital certificates to over 115,000 customers in more than 180 countries,...

Thoma Bravo Completes Acquisition of Riverbed


Thoma Bravo, a leading private equity investment firm, and Teachers’ Private Capital, the private investor department of Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, completed their previously announced acquisition of Riverbed Technology. The acquisition is valued at approximately $3.5 billion, with Riverbed stockholders receiving $21.00 per share in cash. “With this acquisition now complete, our team can begin to move forward with the strategic initiatives...

Blue Coat to be Acquired by Bain Capital from Thoma Bravo


Bain Capital, one of the world’s foremost private investment firms, will acquire Blue Coat Systems from Thoma Bravo for approximately $2.4 billion in cash. Blue Coat, which is based in Sunnyvale, California, provides on-premise, hybrid and cloud-based solutions for protecting web connectivity, combating advanced threats and responding to security breaches. Bain Capital indicated a possible return to the public market for Blue Coat. “We are excited...

NTT Com plans data center expansion in Africa

NTT Communications (NTT Com) is looking to deliver its Nexcenter data center service in the African continent.

The service will be delivered through Internet Solutions of South Africa, which is a subsidiary of Dimension Data and NTT Communications.

The first colocation services will launch in December of this year under the Nexcenter brand at Internet Solutions’ Parklands data center in Johannesburg. The data center will deliver globally-standardized Nexcenter service meeting more than 300 standards governing facilities and operations.

The Nexcenter certified “Parklands Data Center” is located in the heart of Johannesburg’s main business district. The building houses approximately 1,900 square meters of server room facilities over four floors, and provides 1.3 MW of standby battery power. Emergency generators provide power redundancy to a 2N level, and have a fuel capacity that allows for 45 hours of uninterrupted operation. The air conditioning facilities offer cooling system redundancy to N+1 level, and the building’s network topology incorporates an internet exchange (IX) point, improving routing efficiency and fault tolerance. The facility is built to meet TIA942 Tier 3, SOC2 Type2, Type1 and ISO27001 standards. It is planned to expand the building through the addition of a new tower wholly designed by the facility standards of Nexcenter™ to provide 570 high density racks with 2.2 MW power in July 2018.

MEF17: The SD-WAN market is opening up



SD-WAN is no longer a conversation just for network operators - the market is opening to a range of new customer experiences, says Mary Stanhope or iMarket2.  There are new opportunities for cloud providers, application providers, and IoT provider to offer SD-WAN to their users.

See video:  https://youtu.be/tF-MipHBE1Q


McAfee to Acquire Skyhigh for CASB

McAfee agreed to acquire Skyhigh Networks, a start-up offering a cloud access security broker (CASB), for an undisclosed sum.

Skyhigh Networks, which is based in Campbell, California, provides its clients with visibility into content, context, and user activity across SaaS, PaaS and IaaS environments. Skyhigh Networks CEO Rajiv Gupta will join McAfee CEO Chris Young’s leadership team to run McAfee’s new cloud business unit.


“Skyhigh Networks had the foresight five years ago to realize that cybersecurity for cloud environments could not be an impediment to, or afterthought of, cloud adoption,” Young stated. “They pioneered an entirely new product category called cloud access security broker (CASB) that analysts describe as one of the fastest growing areas of information security investments of the last five years – where Skyhigh continues to innovate and lead. Skyhigh’s leadership in cloud security, combined with McAfee’s security portfolio strength, will set the company apart in helping organizations operate freely and securely to reach their full potential.”

“Becoming part of McAfee is the ideal next step in realizing Skyhigh Networks’ vision of not simply making the cloud secure, but making it the most secure environment for business,” Gupta said. “McAfee will provide global scale to further accelerate Skyhigh’s growth, with the combined company providing leading technologies and solutions across cloud and endpoint security – categories Skyhigh and McAfee respectively helped create, and the two architectural control points for enterprise security.”

ZTE wins biggest share of China Unicom's IMS project

ZTE Corporation was awarded 47% of the total contract for China Unicom’s IMS project -- the biggest share of the whole project.

According to the bidding plan, China Unicom selects top 3 vendors of the ranking as its partners to deploy IMS networks in various provinces for services like VoLTE, one number with multiple devices, VoWiFi, and 5G voice services, etc.

ZTE also noted that it won a 70% share of China Mobile’s CM-IMS network VoLTE project in 2015.

To date, ZTE has deployed over 280 IMS commercial/trial projects, including over 70 vIMS projects around the world.

AWS rolls out video production toolset

Amazon Web Services is rolling out a new set of tool to help content developers to create scalable video offerings in the cloud.

AWS Elemental Media Services include the following individual services:

  • AWS Elemental MediaConvert: Format and compress video-on-demand content for delivery to virtually any playback device, with high-quality video transcoding and broadcast-level features.
  • AWS Elemental MediaLive: Encode broadcast-grade live video for televisions or connected devices. Quickly stand up broadcast channels or live events and deliver them reliably to your viewers.
  • AWS Elemental MediaPackage: Prepare and protect live video streams for delivery to Internet devices with rich playback experience features such as start-over TV.
  • AWS Elemental MediaStore: Deliver video from high-performance storage optimized for media.
  • AWS Elemental MediaTailor: Insert targeted advertising into your video without sacrificing quality to increase viewer engagement and boost revenues.

AWS said its goal with these new Elemental Media Services is to eliminate the need to procure expensive equipment for video data centers.

“For the better part of six decades, professional-grade video workflows were limited to a few major industry players who could afford to build and maintain customized infrastructure that would be updated only once or twice each decade,” said Alex Dunlap, General Manager at AWS Elemental. “These companies spent a great deal of time, money, and focus operating infrastructure with resources that could have been better spent creating great content and viewer experiences. We built AWS Elemental Media Services to let customers focus on delivering top-quality video reliably to any device, everywhere, without the undifferentiated heavy lifting of managing infrastructure.”


Trend Micro acquires Immunio and for hybrid cloud security

Trend Micro announced the acquisition of Montréal, Canada-based Immunio, a pioneer in real-time web application security (RASP), providing automatic detection and protection against application security vulnerabilities. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Immunio's mission is to make truly effective real-time web protection technology easily available and widely deployed, and by doing so, stop the biggest source of breached data records.

“We are excited to acquire Immunio’s application protection technology, their team of application security experts and their customers,” said Bill McGee, SVP and GM of Hybrid Cloud Security at Trend Micro. “Technology changes, like cloud computing and container platforms, are enabling faster application development. Immunio’s run-time application security allows our customers to increase protection against software vulnerabilities within the applications they are building.”

Trend Micro is also enhancing its container-specific security capabilities, by supporting container image scanning, which allows security issues to be identified and resolved prior to production release. Customers will be able to scan images in the container registry so that development teams can fix issues prior to deployment and apply run-time protection capabilities based on findings from the imaging.

Aquantia posts Q3 revenue of $26.7 million, up 19% yoy

Aquantia reported Q3 revenue of $26.7 million, an increase of 6.2 percent compared to $25.2 million in the prior quarter, and an increase of 18.6 percent compared to $22.5 million in the third quarter 2016. Total revenue by market for the third quarter 2017 consisted of Data Center revenue of $14.9 million, Enterprise Infrastructure revenue of $10.8 million, Access revenue of $0.9 million, and Automotive revenue of $0.1 million.

Gross profit for the third quarter 2017 was $15.1 million, or 56.5 percent of revenue, compared to $14.3 million, or 56.6 percent of revenue, in the prior quarter, and $13.4 million, or 59.5 percent of revenue, in the third quarter 2016.

Third quarter 2017 net loss was $1.0 million, or $0.21 per basic share, compared to second quarter 2017 net loss of $1.3 million, or $0.29 per basic share, and third quarter 2016 net income of $88,000, or $0.00 per diluted share.

“We are very pleased to have completed our initial public offering on November 3rd, raising more than $65 million for the company,” said Faraj Aalaei, Chairman and CEO of Aquantia. “In the third quarter, we delivered record quarterly revenue. We believe this is a testament to our products and that Aquantia’s leadership in ICs for Multi-Gig Ethernet connectivity in multiple markets gives our customers confidence to build their networks on our technology.”

Toshiba intros 10 TB HDD for video surveillance

Toshiba America Electronic Components introduced a 10 TB hard drive designed for 24/7 streaming operation scenarios, and is typically used for surveillance digital video recorders (SDVR), surveillance network video recorders (SNVR) and Hybrid SDVR. The 3.5-inch drive is optimized to support up to 64 camera streams. Higher capacity and transfer rates enable support for higher resolution camera streams to meet changing compliance mandates for surveillance data.

The MD06ACA-V Series features 7,200 rpm access performance, and the new 10TB model delivers a 58 percent increase in maximum sustained transfer rate when compared to Toshiba’s prior MD04ABA-V series, pushing it to 237MiB/s3.