Infoblox Acquires Netcordia in Key IT Management Deal
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The acquisition of Netcordia by Infoblox brings together companies specializing in increasingly important data center management functions: network change and configuration management, and DDI, an acronym for the combination of DNS, DHCP and IPAM.
Infoblox, a rising hardware appliance manufacturer of Domain Name System servers,
announced May 4 that it has acquired Netcordia, a provider of network change
and configuration management software.
Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Integration of the two companies
begins immediately.
The deal brings together companies with products responsible for increasingly important data center
management functions: NCCM and DDI-an acronym for the combination of DNS, DHCP
(Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) and IPAM (Internet Protocol Address
Management).
"Netcordia's market momentum, customer base, technology and exceptional
employees, coupled with Infoblox's team and unique real-time data distribution
and management expertise, will be invaluable to positioning Infoblox for
continued success as a leading provider of both DDI and NCCM solutions,"
Robert Thomas, president and CEO of 10-year-old
Infoblox, said in a conference call.
Infoblox was founded in 1999 and has shipped about 40,000 DNS appliances to
more than 3,400 customers worldwide, including 145 of the Fortune 500.
As data centers continue to take on more storage, networking and servers-not to
mention virtual machines, and virtualized storage and servers-management of all
these functions becomes increasingly complex.
Application patch management across a large IT system, for example, presents
among the thorniest of these challenges, and single-pane control of this
function, which is what Infoblox provides, is a welcome asset to IT managers.
Another example of what the new Infoblox will be able to do as a result of
adding Netcordia is that when an unknown or unexpected IP address shows up on a
network, Infoblox's current software can detect it, but can't do anything
proactive about it. Using Netcordia's discovery and search functions, Infoblox
now will be able to trace and locate the IP address and remove it from the
system, if necessary.
"I was surprised to hear this. Most of the consolidation in the space has
taken place at the hands of the larger platform suite vendors, who have
selected NCCM technologies to sort of fill in their portfolios of
solutions," Jim Frey, a senior analyst with Enterprise Management
associates, told the conference call audience. "There has been a steady
and unending increase in the rate of change in the network layer, driven in
large part by virtualization and the cloud. Automation is really the only
practical answer."
Steve Nye, Infoblox executive vice president of product strategy, told the
conference call audience that the two companies have little product overlap and
their software can stand alone or be used in tandem, depending on the needs of
the customer.
"This level of automation is becoming even more important as network
managers are taxed to support an ever-growing number of IP devices [and] new
applications like virtualization and cloud computing, and meet stringent
availability and compliance regulations," Nye said.
Infoblox is headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif.,
while Netcordia is based in Annapolis, Md.
Netcordia's employees will be retained in the acquisition, Infoblox said.
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Chris Preimesberger was named Editor-in-Chief of Features & Analysis at eWEEK in November 2011. Previously he served eWEEK as Senior Writer, covering a range of IT sectors that include data center systems, cloud computing, storage, virtualization, green IT, e-discovery and IT governance. His blog, Storage Station, is considered a go-to information source. Chris won a national Folio Award for magazine writing in November 2011 for a cover story on Salesforce.com and CEO-founder Marc Benioff, and he has served as a judge for the SIIA Codie Awards since 2005. In previous IT journalism, Chris was a founding editor of both IT Manager's Journal and DevX.com and was managing editor of Software Development magazine. His diverse resume also includes: sportswriter for the Los Angeles Daily News, covering NCAA and NBA basketball, television critic for the Palo Alto Times Tribune, and Sports Information Director at Stanford University. He has served as a correspondent for The Associated Press, covering Stanford and NCAA tournament basketball, since 1983. He has covered a number of major events, including the 1984 Democratic National Convention, a Presidential press conference at the White House in 1993, the Emmy Awards (three times), two Rose Bowls, the Fiesta Bowl, several NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments, a Formula One Grand Prix auto race, a heavyweight boxing championship bout (Ali vs. Spinks, 1978), and the 1985 Super Bowl. A 1975 graduate of Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., Chris has won more than a dozen regional and national awards for his work. He and his wife, Rebecca, have four children and reside in Redwood City, Calif.Follow on Twitter: editingwhiz
