Oracle has spent the past few years building out a global data center network for its cloud services operations, and is hoping to improve performance and customer experience across it with the acquisition of Dyn. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed, but here are some key details from a letter attributed to Oracle president Thomas Kurian:
On November 21, 2016, Oracle announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire Dyn, the leading cloud-based Internet Performance and DNS provider that monitors, controls, and optimizes Internet applications and cloud services to deliver faster access, reduced page load times, and higher end-user satisfaction.
Dyn's solution is powered by a global network that drives 40 billion traffic optimization decisions daily for more than 3,500 enterprise customers, including preeminent digital brands such as Netflix, Twitter, Pfizer and CNBC. Adding Dyn's best-in-class DNS solution extends the Oracle cloud computing platform and provides enterprise customers with a one-stop shop for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).
Oracle already offers enterprise-class IaaS and PaaS for companies building and running Internet applications and cloud services. Dyn's immensely scalable and global DNS is a critical core component and a natural extension to our cloud computing platform. 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.
Dyn made headlines for an unhappy reason in October, after its DNS infrastructure was hit by massive denial-of-service attacks linked to the Miral IoT botnet. Overall, the company was able to employ countermeasures and mitigate the attacks within hours. While the incident was unfortunate for Dyn from a public-relations standpoint, the company took a highly transparent posture with customers in regard to explaining how the attacks occurred and what was done to thwart them.
In any case, DNS and hosted DNS services are crucial to providing a full service IaaS offering to enterprises, so Oracle's move to acquire Dyn makes sense, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. The recent attack on Dyn may have also helped bring down the acquisition price, he adds.
"Apart from being strategic, DNS services also carry insights on what is running where, so this is a good acquisition by Oracle," Mueller says. "It's a one stop shop—you lift and shift to Oracle and get DNS services for what is moved and for what may stay."
Oracle's IaaS business remains the smallest component of its cloud offerings on a revenue basis, and is dwarfed by the likes of Amazon Web Services. At the recent OpenWorld conference, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison unveiled a next-generation IaaS he described as faster and cheaper than AWS. Ellison also pledged that Oracle will put plenty of wood behind the marketing arrows for its IaaS over the next couple of years, and the Dyn acquisition stands out as a particularly sharp one of these.
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