Arbor CEO says his company will benefit from Ellacoya's extensive DPI product set.
In an effort to meet increased demand for traffic and service management from its customer base, Arbor said today that it had agreed to purchase Ellacoya Networks, a privately held DPI vendor in Merrimack, N.H., for an undisclosed amount.
Arbor Networks is about to add deep packet inspection services to its roster.
In an effort to meet increased demand for traffic and service management from its customer base, Arbor said today that it had agreed to purchase Ellacoya Networks, a privately held DPI vendor, for an undisclosed amount. The two companies had combined revenues of around $70 million last year, and are projected to reach $100 million in revenues this year, says Jack Boyle, Arbor’s CEO. Boyle also estimates that the companies will have a combined customer base of around 300 ISPs.
Arbor primarily specializes in guarding service provider networks from security threats such as distributed denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, botnets and worms. Boyle says he expects Ellacoya’s DPI portfolio to serve as a complement to Arbor’s flow-based security services. From Ellacoya’s perspective, Ellacoya CEO Gerald Wesel says he hopes his company can benefit from an increased customer base and says many of his customers have recently shown increased demand for expanded security services.
“What we’ve been hearing from our customers is that the security piece [of network management] and the DPI piece are becoming one and the same,” he says. “Service providers have told us that they loved our solution, but that they need to be protected from DDoS attacks and other threats as well.”
Deep packet inspection is an extension of application-switch technology that directs, persists, filters and logs IP-based applications and Web services traffic based on the content of a packet’s header or payload, regardless of the protocol or application type, and is a more thorough packet-searching technology than shallow packet inspection, which only inspects the packet’s header. Wesel says rapidly growing bandwidth demand has been a major driver for the growth of Ellacoya’s DPI services, such as its e100 platform, which allows providers to manage traffic packets by subscriber, service type, and time of day, and which also provides quality assurance for such high-bandwidth applications as IPTV, VoIP and streaming video.
“YouTube alone is consuming as much bandwidth today as the entire Internet was in 2000,” he says. “There really has been a groundswell in demand for DPI technology, but we weren’t in the financial position to take advantage of that until we merged with Arbor.”
“We have some huge opportunities to capitalize on what we both bring to the table,” Boyle says. “We felt that by combining our two companies, we could merge both network and security concerns.”
