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F5 Networks on Tuesday announced its planned acquisition of WAN optimization and application acceleration provider Swan Labs in a $43 million cash deal.
F5 Networks Inc., which has historically focused on applications traffic management, said it intends to use Swan Labs Corp.s offerings to accelerate its product road map for adding more application acceleration functionality to its Big IP Version 9 and its modular TMOS (Traffic Management Operating System) software.
“Swan accelerates our efforts and gets us more expertise in this space,” said Dan Matte, senior vice president of marketing at F5 Networks in Seattle.
“The Swan Labs piece will give us flexibility to offer solutions that are stand-alone for optimization, or to give us platforms that address that and have other feature sets integrated into the same device.
“One reason we developed TMOS was to give F5 a foundation to be able to integrate these intelligent network functions in a way that makes sense for people,” he added.
Swan Labs brings to the table branch office-based optimization that works in conjunction with a device at a hub or data center.
F5 said it intends to market Swan Labs WANJet branch office appliance and WebAccelerator Web application optimization technology as stand-alone offerings, as well as integrate them with its TMOS software.
The acquisition, expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year, is contingent on certain Swan Labs employees accepting employment with F5 Networks. “Its important to us that we bring the whole team across,” Matte said.
That includes Swan Labs CEO Andrew Foss, Matte added, saying that Foss is expected to serve in a “combination visionary, evangelist and almost CTO [chief technology officer] function.”