Brocade Acquires Riverbed’s SteelApp for Virtual ADC

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Riverbed Technology is selling its SteelApp virtual Application Delivery Controller (ADC) business to Brocade. Financial terms of the deal are not being publicly disclosed.

Once the deal is approved, existing Riverbed SteelApp development and field staff will join Brocade. Sources tell Enterprise Networking Planet that Brocade has not yet determined whether the SteelApp brand name will be retained, or whether the business will be rebranded.

The SteelApp name has only been around since April of 2014. At the time, Riverbed rebranded its entire product portfolio to include the name “Steel” in its products to emphasize the brand of its flagship SteelHead WAN optimization and acceleration technology.

Prior to being rebranded as SteelApp, the virtual ADC technology was known as Riverbed Stingray, though Stingray itself is also not the original name of the technology. The Stingray technology is based on technology assets that Riverbed gained through the acquisition of technology vendor Zeus in July of 2011. At that point, the technology was known as Zeus Aptimizer. Riverbed renamed it to the Stingray Traffic Manager in October of 2011.

Riverbed chairman and CEO Jerry Kennelly has been busy of late, reshuffling Riverbed’s business. Riverbed sold its SteelStore storage acceleration business, which was once known as Whitewater, to NetApp for $80 million in October of 2014.

As a company, Riverbed announced at the end of 2014 that it was going private in a $3.6 billion deal led by Thoma Bravo.

“The decision to divest the SteelApp product line reflects Riverbed’s ongoing commitment to focus on businesses and opportunities that leverage our core competencies,” Kennelly said in a statement.

For its part, Brocade has had a portfolio of physical ADCs, known as the ADX, ever since it acquired Foundry for $3 billion back in 2008.

“We are thrilled to add SteelApp’s widely-adopted solution to our portfolio and will invest our existing ADC resources to aggressively advance the roadmap and extend it into our open Vyatta Platform offering for NFV and SDN,” Lloyd Carney, CEO of Brocade, said in a statement.

Vyatta is Brocade’s Software Defined Networking (SDN) division, which also came to Brocade by way of a 2012 acquisition.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Enterprise Networking Planet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.

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