Oracle have been quietly building out their next generation cloud environments, building up a cloud practice with seasoned professionals that includes Ex-VCE, VMware and AWS personal. They have released a completely new version of their IaaS layer cloud. Dipping into their not insignificant loose pocket change to make several key purchases or acquisitions this year.
Now in what should be their last acquisition of 2016 they have now acquired Dyn for an undisclosed amount; but according to Dan Primack, a former senior editor at Fortune it is expected to be in the region of $600million.
Dyn are a Manchester, New Hampshire based internet DNS provider founded in 1998, who have unfortunately recently been in the news for all the wrong reasons. They were the target of a massive DDoS attack in October that caused by a botnet using Mirai. Mirai is Malware that targeted Linux based systems and took down numerous high profile sites on the east coast of the USA including Spotify, New York Times, Twitter and eBay. Whether this issue affected the purchase price is to date unknown.
The DNS service is a core component in the managing of access to those cloud resources from anywhere in the world, a service that Oracle until this acquisition did not have an owned, and therefore controlled, offering. This is asserted by Thomas Kurian, president of product development at Oracle who stated “Dyn’s immensely scalable and global DNS is a critical core component and a natural extension to our cloud computing platform”. This purchase will potentially bring Oracle Cloud’s DNS routing and traffic performance capabilities up to that of Amazons’ AWS’s Route 53 and Microsoft’s Azure DNS.
As is normal, this acquisition is subject to Oracle’s usual shenanigans regarding ongoing services. As usual Dyn’s customers have been put on notice that Oracle could merge or end of life some of Dyn’s existing operations.
This is a very astute acquisition for Oracle, Dyn are not your average DNS provider they provide a core global DNS system that is highly distributed and ignoring the previously mentioned DDoS attack very resilient. At no time during the DDos attack did Dyn lose total service. Their network optimization services, to enhance traffic, flow over the internet to over 3500 customers. Oracle, as can be seen from the table below, has been investing heavily in expanding and improving their Cloud based services during 2016, this is their 9th known acquisition this year.
[table id=7 /]Oracle moving into 2017 are in a much better position regarding their cloud offerings that we ever thought possible at the beginning of 2016, especially considering Larry’s marked indifference to it over the years.