Brocade has announced its intent to acquire Riverbed Technology’s SteelApp product line in an all-cash asset transaction. SteelApp is one of the top virtual ADCs providing scalable, secured, and elastic delivery of enterprise, cloud, and e-commerce applications. The SteelApp product line controls traffic to and from applications and would enable fast, reliable, and secure application delivery to users anywhere from the cloud or data center.
The SteelApp product line will be added to Brocade‘s growing portfolio of software networking products including virtual routing, firewall, VPN, SDN controller, and network visibility and analytics. Combined with its portfolio of network hardware products, these disruptive additions would strengthen Brocade’s portfolio for data center deployments, spanning enterprise, cloud and telco customers. Riverbed SteelApp development and field personnel will join Brocade after closing.
“Brocade continues to execute aggressively to capitalize on the disruptive force of software in IP networking,” said Lloyd Carney, CEO of Brocade. “Brocade is the #2 data center networking vendor worldwide and this acquisition strengthens Brocade‘s unique position as the adoption of software-centric networking is accelerating. We are thrilled to add SteelApp’s widely-adopted solution to our portfolio and will invest our existing ADC resources to aggressively advance the roadmap and extend it into our open Vyatta Platform offering for NFV and SDN.”
ADCs provide application availability, acceleration, and security for users. This includes shielding them from interruptions due to bursts in demand, providing various optimizations based on application type, and facilitating access based upon specific policies. Deploying this functionality in software (vADCs) would enable a dramatically better level of flexibility and cost, and aligns directly with Brocade’s NFV strategy.
