Posted by Seattle, USA: F5 will acquire Volterra – an edge-as-a-service platform for $500 million and build an edge platform for enterprises and service providers. The company said in an issued statement.
Under a definitive agreement signed between the two companies, F5 will acquire all issued and outstanding shares of Volterra for $440 million in cash. And pay $60 million in deferred stock payments and incentive compensation to founders and employees.
Leveraging Volterra’s technology platform, F5 said it is creating an edge platform built for enterprises and service providers that will be security-first and app-driven with unlimited scale.
“Current edge solutions are simply inadequate for today’s enterprise customers,” said François Locoh-Donou, President and CEO, F5.
“It’s time to break out of closed edge systems that only perpetuate the pain of building, running, and securing apps,” added Locoh-Donou.
F5 Networks banking heavily on Volterra’s acquistion as it aims to solve the complex multi-cloud challenge for enterprises with its edge platform.
“With Volterra, we advance our Adaptive Applications vision with an Edge 2.0 platform that solves the complex multi-cloud reality enterprise customers confront. Our platform will create a SaaS solution that solves our customers’ biggest pain points,” explained Locoh-Donou.
Organisations around the world are rapidly innovating to provide new ways to enhance the experience they deliver to customers, partners, and employees through application, according to Haiyan Song, EVP and GM – Security, F5 Network,
“But for many organizations, this innovation comes with increased technical complexity and an expanded attack surface for security threats,” Song said in an official blog post.
She explained that to address these challenges and enable F5 customers to deliver rich digital experiences, her company F5 has agreed to acquire Volterra, an innovator in distributed cloud and edge services.
The Santa Carla based tech startup Volterra has investment from Samsung Electronics and Microsoft along with venture capital firms Khosla Ventures and Mayfield.
“I am excited to work closely alongside François and the F5 team to help pioneer the evolution of the edge to deliver more adaptive, dynamic application experiences for all of our customers,” said Ankur Singla, Founder and CEO, Volterra.
“With our platform, we will extend F5’s application security leadership to the edge, thereby expanding our combined reach in the fastest growing segment of F5’s $28 billion 2023 total addressable market,” added Singla.
Volterra enables a new Edge 2.0 open edge platform that will transform F5’s position in enterprise application security and delivery, addressing the challenges inherent with first-generation edge solutions.
F5’s Edge 2.0 platform will be:
Security-first: Delivering industry-leading security instead of commodity security added to a CDN or cloud.
App-driven: Providing universal, “build once, deploy globally” app delivery. This software-defined edge based on industry-standard containers and APIs removes multi-cloud complexity.
Unlimited in scale: Edge 2.0 breaks apps out of the “CDN jail” of closed edge platforms, running all services on any server, across all clouds and data centres.
Boards of directors of both F5 and Volterra have approved the transaction, which is subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of the calendar year 2021.