Juniper Acquires Virtualization Security Ace Altor
The Altor deal marks the third acquisition in as many weeks by Juniper -- not known for frequent M&A activity -- following its pickup of WLAN vendor Trapeze Networks and its purchase of intellectual property assets from Blackwave, an Internet video storage and delivery vendor.
Juniper and Altor were already partners, and bringing Altor into the Juniper family allows Juniper to bolster its security architecture for protecting physical and virtual systems. With virtualization continuing to grow as a must-have technology for enterprises, securing it with purpose-built products is also a growing need.
Altor, founded in 2007 and based in Redwood Shores, Calif., was featured in CRN's ongoing Emerging Vendor series earlier this year. The company specializes in enterprise customers seeking stronger security for virtualized environments, especially those where compliance regulations like PCI, Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA are an issue.
Its products include traditional security offerings like intrusion detection and firewall geared for virtualized infrastructure. Juniper made a venture investment in Altor early in 2010.
"Juniper is excited to acquire one of the industry's leading virtualization security vendors and the extremely talented team that built it," said Mark Bauhaus, Juniper's executive vice president and general manager, Service Layer Technologies, in a statement. "This acquisition will extend our leadership in data center and cloud security and will enable customers to deploy a consistent set of security services across their physical and virtual infrastructure, while delivering total cost of ownership."
Altor's employees and products will become part of the Service Layer Technologies group at Juniper.
"Altor has led the virtualization security market in innovation, defense-in-depth and performance," added Amir Ben-Efraim, Altor's CEO and co-founder, in a statement. "Today, we join forces with Juniper, which shares a common vision for securing data centers and the cloud, and together we look forward to extending our leadership in the VM security market."