F5 Snaps Up Swan Labs

Swan Labs Corp. has become the latest wide-area network (WAN) specialist to get snapped up by a big-name data center vendor, with F5 Networks Inc. (Nasdaq: FFIV) stumping up $43 million for the San Jose, Calif.-based startup (see F5 to Acquire Swan Labs).

The deal, announced late yesterday, is expected to close by Dec. 31, the end of F5's fiscal first quarter.

Swan Labs 42 employees, including its management team, would join F5 in the deal. But a mass exodus to F5's Seattle headquarters is unlikely, as F5 is planning to consolidate Swan Labs’ headquarters with its own development site in San Jose, says Dan Matte, F5’s senior vice president of marketing.

F5 plans to integrate Swan Labs’ products with the Traffic Management Operating System (TMOS) used on its own devices. Users would have the choice of either a standalone Swan Labs product or a combined F5/Swan Labs device, Matte says. But the exec is unable to give specifics on when these products would likely be launched.

Swan Labs is one of a handful of vendors combining the bandwidth-scrunching features of WAN optimizers with the ability to eliminate chattiness that's characteristic of wide-area file services (WAFS) applications on IP networks (see Remote Site Rapprochement).Read the rest of the story at NDCF.

— James Rogers, Site Editor, Next-Gen Data Center Forum