Oracle announced on Nov. 21 that it is acquiring privately-held DNS services provider Dyn. Financial terms of the deal are not being publicly disclosed, though the company has raised $88 million in funding, including a $50 million Series B announced on May 10.
On Oct. 21, Dyn made headlines around the world as the company was the victim of a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack that crippled many popular online services including Twitter, Reddit, Spotify, GitHub and Soundcloud, among others.
Oracle declined a request from eWEEK for any comments on the timing or value of the Dyn acquisition news. As such, it’s not clear when Oracle began negotiating with Dyn or if the DDoS attack had any material impact on the company’s value. In June 2015, Cisco acquired OpenDNS, which operates in a similar space, for $635 million.
“Dyn’s immensely scalable and global DNS is a critical core component and a natural extension to our cloud computing platform,” Thomas Kurian President, Product Development at Oracle, wrote in a letter to customers. “With Dyn, Oracle cloud customers will now have unique access to Internet performance information that will help them optimize infrastructure costs, maximize application and website-driven revenue, and manage risk.”
While Dyn is known for its managed DNS services, it also provides an internet performance monitoring and management platform as well. In a Frequently Asked Questions list about the acquisition of Dyn, Oracle noted that Dyn provides enterprises the ability to monitor, control, and optimize internet applications and cloud services to deliver faster access as well as reduced page load times.
Dyn’s global network now helps to deliver 40 billion internet traffic optimizations on a daily basis. Dyn also brings to Oracle a large base of more than 3,500 customers including well known brands such as Twitter, CNBC, Netflix and Pfizer.
In an investor presentation detailing the Dyn acquisition, Oracle notes that Dyn collects 240 billion data points daily to create a global map of internet traffic. The presentation also states that enterprises require a global DNS solution to connect end-users to internet applications and cloud services. DNS (Domain Name System) is the technology that maps Internet Protocol addresses to domain names.
“Oracle Cloud customers will have unique access to Internet performance information that will help them optimize infrastructure costs, maximize application and website-driven revenue, and manage risk,” Kyle York, Chief Strategy Officer at Dyn, said in a statement.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist