Infotech Lead America: Fortinet is set to buy Coyote Point Systems, a privately-held software company.
Coyote Point provides software for load-balancing and application delivery technologies that help servers stay up and running and play a role in computer network security, such as mitigating traffic floods in denial-of-service attacks.
The acquisition will complement Fortinet’s strategy to increase its data center presence to meet the growing demands for cloud computing solutions. Availability of application servers is gaining importance as mobile and cloud computing is being rapidly adopted globally.
According to a research from Frost & Sullivan, the Asia-Pacific application delivery controller (ADC) market is projected to reach $1.36 billion in 2018.
Coyote Point was founded in 1999. The company markets the Equalizer ADC product line. While terms of the acquisition are not being disclosed, they are not expected to have an impact on Fortinet’s Q1 operating results.
Ken Xie, founder, president and chief executive officer of Fortinet, said: “This acquisition complements Fortinet’s Network Security strategy and allows the company and our channel partners to accelerate and further deliver on our vision of providing complete and comprehensive security into the enterprise.”
The acquisition will also generate synergy among existing Fortinet products, including FortiGate, FortiBalancer, FortiDDoS and FortiWeb platforms.
The acquisition will not immediately affect Coyote Point’s product offerings, customer support and channel programs or any existing ADC products that Fortinet markets. Future products and solution offerings will be announced according to their availability.
Enterprises need ADCs to optimize reliability, end-user performance, data center resource use and security for a variety of enterprise applications. Industry forecasts predict that the annual end-user spending for Application Delivery Controllers will exceed $2 billion for 2013.
Fortinet’s fourth-quarter revenues were $151.2 million, up 25 percent from the same quarter in 2011. Product grew by 24 percent to $71 million, and services revenue grew 26 percent to $76.7 million for the fourth quarter.
Fortinet has experienced 55 percent year over year growth in its enterprise sales, and triple digit growth in the number of large deals of $1 million or more.
Recently, Fortinet launched FortiGate-3600C, a network security appliance for large enterprises and managed security service providers (MSSP).
Sangeeta Sudhakaran
