Today’s topics include investment firm Thoma Bravo’s acquisition of Barracuda Networks for $1.6 billion; how the Microsoft Azure cloud is supporting location-based Services with the help of TomTom GPS technology; Confluent Cloud’s implementation of Apache Kafka for real-time data feeds; and Comtrade’s HYCU for Nutanix platform gains support for VMware vSphere, Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server.
Security vendor Barracuda Network announced on Nov.27 that it has agreed to be acquired by private equity investment firm Thoma Bravo in a cash deal valued at $1.6 billion.
Thoma Bravo will pay Barracuda Networks shareholders $27.55 per common share, representing a 22.5 percent premium over the company’s 10-day average stock price prior to the deal’s announcement.
The acquisition is expected to close by Feb. 28, 2018. “We will continue Barracuda’s tradition of delivering easy-to-use, full-featured solutions,” said BJ Jenkins, CEO of Barracuda.
“Thoma Bravo has an excellent history of investing in growing security businesses, and this transaction speaks to the value and strength of Barracuda’s security platform.”
Microsoft on Nov. 28 unveiled Azure Location Based Services, a set of APIs that allow developers to endow their applications with location awareness, along with mapping, routing, traffic, geocoding and time zone information.
Location data is being furnished through digital mapmaker TomTom’s GPS technology. According Sam George, director of Azure IoT at Microsoft, “This is the first time that a cloud vendor has integrated a location service directly into their cloud service.”
Combined with Microsoft’s suite of cloud-based IoT services, businesses can use Azure Location Based Services to build applications that track field assets, provide intelligent routing capabilities and drive efficiency in smart city systems for use in the manufacturing, logistics, retail and automotive industries, among others.
Confluent announced Nov. 28 that its Confluent Cloud is now available for enterprise production workloads. Built by the original creators of Apache Kafka, Confluent Cloud is a fully-managed service that enables enterprises to deploy their customer experience projects, fleet management upgrades, fraud detection and other real-time, large-scale initiatives in one place.
Apache Kafka is an open-source data stream processing platform that provides a unified, high-throughput, low-latency platform for handling real-time data feeds. Confluent improves Kafka by expanding its integration capabilities, adding tools to optimize and manage Kafka clusters, and ensuring the streams are secure.
Confluent’s platform includes Confluent Cloud, Confluent Enterprise and Confluent Open Source, to create a more complete distribution of Kafka intended for large-scale production across a variety of environments.
Comtrade Software, in partnership with Nutanix, announced on Nov. 27 that it is offering new support for VMware vSphere, Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS, Microsoft Exchange, and SQL Server.
The support is also combined with disaster recovery and backup for Remote Office Branch Office environments, as well as blueprints for including Nutanix Calm Marketplace and beta for Acropolis File Services. Earlier this year, Comtrade launched its HYCU platform, which is purpose-built data storage protection for Nutanix servers.
“With HYCU, our customers gain the flexibility and choice they need in order to best converge their protection and recovery onto the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform,” said Raja Mukhopadhyay, Vice President of Product Management at Nutanix.