F5 Networks Closes $500M Volterra Deal To Further Edge Expertise

F5 Networks closed its $500 million acquisition of edge specialist Volterra on Monday.

The addition of Volterra’s technology will allow F5 to build a secure and scalable edge platform, Edge 2.0, for enterprises and service providers, according to F5‘s President and CEO François Locoh-Donou.

“Joining forces, we will deliver the enterprise-grade features, including world-class security and scale, that have been missing from the edge until now,” Locoh-Donou said in a statement.

The application delivery specialist first announced plans to acquire Volterra, a four-year old startup with an edge-as-a-service platform, earlier this month.

[Related: F5 Networks Launches 5G Portfolio To Ready Cloud-Native Architectures For New Services]

Founded in Santa Clara, Calif., Volterra owns a platform that lets enterprises build, deploy, secure and operate applications and data in a uniform fashion across all public and private clouds and edge compute environments. The Volterra team has joined F5 networks.

Enterprises are struggling to deliver and secure applications, which now live across local and wide area networks, public clouds, content delivery networks and other edge infrastructures. F5‘s first generation of its edge solution -- Edge 1.0 -- could tackle some of those issues said Kara Sprague, executive vice president and general manager of F5’s BIG-IP product portfolio in a blog post on the Volterra deal. Volterra’s technology will help F5 advance its platform and move away from a “closed” edge offering, Sprague said.

Specifically, Edge 2.0 will help service providers and enterprise serve up new experiences for their end customers by automating redundant processes, offering end to end security, increasing application agility, and harnessing application insights, Sprague said.

“We look forward to working together to redefine the edge and make adaptive applications a reality for our customers,” she said.