ARN

IaaS vendor Dyn buys out Nettica for DNS services, talent

  • Jon Gold (Network World)
  • 26 March, 2014 13:13

New Hampshire-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service company Dyn announced today that it would purchase managed DNS provider Nettica. Terms were not disclosed.

In addition to a new client base Nettica has over 9,000 clients, the most high-profile of which is probably Evernote Dyn's stated objective is to acquire expertise in the managed DNS sector. Nettica co-founder Alan Graham and others will join Dyn's staff.

+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: IRS: Bitcoin is property not money | The promise of the seamless cloud +

"This acquisition is a true consolidation within the DNS industry," said Dyn CEO Jeremy Hitchcock in a statement. "We have gained both great technology and great talent."

According to 451 Research senior analyst Jim Davis, Dyn's focus on managed DNS is unusually tight the company's bigger rivals, like Verisign, tend to offer the service as part of a larger package, but Dyn is apparently working to dominate this important but underserved part of the marketplace.

"The longer-term vision is building more services around managed DNS, which isn't always the sexiest or most talked-about part of the Internet world," he said. "But it's certainly very important in terms of keeping sites running, making sure people are going to the right site and not getting commandeered by some hacker, and, increasingly, it's important for enterprises using cloud to be able to make sure that those services are continually running."

Dyn has acquired three other managed DNS services companies in the past four years: EveryDNS and EditDNS in 2010, and TZO in 2012. Other acquisitions over that period include web monitoring startup Verelo in 2013 and message management company SendLabs in 2010.

That said, the central upside to the Nettica acquisition, according to Davis, is the aforementioned new talent that Dyn can integrate.

"Making sure that you have a lot of folks who are knowledgeable about this very specialized part of the Internet infrastructure industry is key to being able to develop new services, and they've done a good job over the years of acquiring folks in this space and keeping them on board," he said.

Even so, Davis added, the data from Nettica's current customers is also of analytical value to Dyn, largely for guidance on the performance of the company's other services.

"It feeds into that information about how to load-balance across different geographies and different cloud service providers," he said.

Email Jon Gold at jgold@nww.com and follow him on Twitter at @NWWJonGold.