Intel Corp made its eighth buy of the year in the networking space yesterday, with the announcement that it will acquire privately-held IPivot Inc for $500m in cash. The Poway, California-based IPivot designs and manufacturers traffic management hardware and software that addresses bottlenecks at the server. The company claims that its products help improve the performance of server farms, web sites and e-commerce applications by intelligently determining where data should be processed and then sending the request to the server that can deliver the best response time – reducing the time it takes to load web pages, a spokesperson said.
Customers will return to the site that delivers the best performance and service, said John Miner, VP of Intel’s communications products group. Information has to be available instantly and new devices are needed to manage ever larger workloads securely and efficiently -IPivot’s traffic management gear will enable Intel to provide this. IPivots commerce accelerator box is targeted at improving e-commerce by accelerating certain security functions, a spokesperson said.
Intel counts IPivot as its third acquisition in the e-commerce equipment market which started with Dayna Communications in 1997 for an undisclosed sum and Shiva Corp last year for $182m. Dayna manufacturers adapters, switches, hubs and other networking products for small businesses and Shiva builds remote access and virtual private network gear. The IPivot deal marks Intel’s eighth acquisition in the networking space this year.
Intel plans to sell IPivot’s equipment directly to OEMs and through its ISP channel. The chip giant hopes to close the deal by the end of the year and following this, IPivot’s one hundred or so employees will be integrated into the network systems division within Intel’s communications products group.
