Radware Acquires Web Optimization Company Strangeloop Networks

Dan Rayburn | Monday February 11, 2013 | 12:01 AM | Comments (0)

imagesLast Thursday, privately held Strangeloops Networks, which focuses on web optimization, announced they had been acquired by Radware (RDRW). Terms of the deal were not announced but multiple industry folks say Strangeloop was valued at under $20M.

Strangeloop is one of the leading companies offering a front-end optimization service in the market and was working with Amazon to give AWS customers the ability to make their sites perform faster by using FEO. Strangeloop has also been working with Level 3 for some time and the joint Level 3/Strangeloop solution was one of the main reasons Akamai was forced to go out and buy Blaze, an FEO competitor to Strangeloop. I haven’t had the chance to catch up with the Strangeloop folks but Radware says they will use Strangeloop’s technology to target e-commerce and enterprise customers. On paper it’s a good fit for Radware as the company already focuses on web acceleration technologies, specifically application delivery and application security solutions for virtual and cloud data centers

FEO might sound similar to another subject I have written about lately, dynamic site acceleration (DSA), but it’s very different. DSA’s focus is to bring network resources closer to the user by pre-fetching or caching files. FEO makes the content itself faster. DSA makes page resources download faster. FEO reduces the number of page resources required to download a given page and makes the browser process the page faster. Companies offering FEO technology have been really hot as of late with four FEO vendors all recently being acquired. Strangeloop is now owned by Radware, Blaze got bought by Akamai, Limelight acquired AcceloWeb and Riverbed acquired Aptimize. Another up and coming small player in the FEO and web acceleration space is Yottaa.

If you want to learn more about FEO technology and why it is so important to CDNs, read my post entitled “Why Web Applications And Mobile Browsing Are Making The Front-end A Major Performance Bottleneck“.

Filed in Acquisitions & Investments, Content Delivery | Permalink | Comments (0)