Juniper Networks has announced the acquisition of Altor Networks, a company that specialises in security for virtualised environments. The deal, announced and closed on the same day, is worth $95m, net of the shares Juniper already owns in Altor.
Juniper claims that the deal will help it improve its security offering for physical and virtual systems. Altor’s products include a high-performance hypervisor-based firewall, on-board intrusion detection, network visibility and monitoring and compliance reporting. Its technology gives clients the visibility into the applications, services and traffic being sent between virtual machines, Juniper claims.
Juniper said one of the drivers behind the acquisition was the increase in popularity of virtualisation technology, as businesses look for ways to cut back on hardware spend in the data centre. The company will now be pushing its cloud and virtualisation security offerings as it steps up its battle with networking giant Cisco.
"Juniper is excited to acquire one of the industry’s leading virtualisation security vendors and the extremely talented team that built it," said Mark Bauhaus, executive vice president and general manager, Service Layer Technologies at Juniper Networks. "This acquisition will extend our leadership in data centre and cloud security and will enable customers to deploy a consistent set of security services across their physical and virtual infrastructure, while delivering lowest total cost of ownership."
Altor Networks was founded in 2007 by ex-Check Point, Oracle and Cisco staffers. It took funding from a number of companies, including Juniper. Its customers include the US Army, Attunity, SnagAJob.com and Affiliated Computer Services (ACS).
"Altor has led the virtualisation security market in innovation, defence-in-depth and performance," said Amir Ben-Efraim, CEO and co-founder of Altor Networks. "Today, we join forces with Juniper, which shares a common vision for securing data centres and the cloud, and together we look forward to extending our leadership in the VM security market. We are excited about the opportunity to leverage Juniper’s world-class organisation and market-leading products to deliver tightly integrated, feature-rich security solutions to customers."
Content from our partners
