The two companies announced a definitive agreement under which F5 will acquire all issued and outstanding shares of privately held Volterra for $440 million in cash and $60 million in deferred consideration and compensation to founders and employees.
Haiyan Song (pictured), F5’s executive VP of security, said: “With Volterra, F5 will transform how customers deliver digital experiences and address the application security and delivery challenges we’re seeing from existing edge technologies. F5+Volterra creates a new paradigm that unifies security and applications across cloud and edge with global consistency.”
F5 said that with the merger, it “is creating an edge platform built for enterprises and service providers that will be security-first and app-driven with unlimited scale”.
Former Ciena executive François Locoh-Donou, who is president and CEO of F5, said: “Current edge solutions are simply inadequate for today’s enterprise customers. It’s time to break out of closed edge systems that only perpetuate the pain of building, running, and securing apps.”
F5 will create a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution “that solves our customers’ biggest pain points”, said Locoh-Donou. “The success of F5’s software transformation has put us in a position to deliver on the potential of Edge 2.0 and redefine our competitive position.”
Song, who joined F5 only this month, claimed that the combined operation will create “the first Edge 2.0 platform built for enterprises and service providers”. She defined Edge 2.0 features as putting security first, app-driven and with unlimited scalability.
“We will leverage Volterra’s globally distributed app-to-app network and an infinitely scalable edge capability to deliver a new, purely software-defined edge platform,” she said.
“The combination of Volterra’s unique capabilities with F5’s best-of-breed solutions will unlock an unmatched ability to create unified app security and delivery across environments, without dependence on a CDN architecture with point of presence infrastructure demands.”
The deal will be fast, expected to close during this first quarter of 2021. The boards of directors of both companies have approved the transaction.
Volterra founder and CEO Ankur Singla and the Volterra leadership team “will join F5 in key management roles”, said the companies. Volterra will remain in its current Santa Clara headquarters. F5 is based in Seattle.
