Riverbed flogs ADC arm to Brocade

Divestment comes ahead of Riverbed's planned takeover by Thoma Bravo

WAN optimisation vendor Riverbed is offloading its application delivery controller (ADC) arm to Brocade as part of its strategy to focus on its core business.

Storage vendor Brocade has announced its intention to acquire Riverbed's SteelApp product line in an all-cash transaction.

The move comes as NASDAQ-listed Riverbed gets set to go private after reaching a definitive agreement to be acquired by private equity house Thoma Bravo in December. The deal is to close some time in the first half of 2015.

"The decision to divest the SteelApp product line reflects Riverbed's ongoing commitment to focus on businesses and opportunities that leverage our core competencies," said Riverbed chief executive Jerry Kennelly.

"Riverbed is focused on providing solutions that provide CIOs unparalleled visibility, optimisation, and control in the hybrid enterprise, ensuring on-premise, cloud and SaaS applications perform as needed."

Brocade will add SteelApp to its line-up of software networking products including virtual routing, firewall, VPN, SDN controller, and network visibility and analytics.

It builds on the vendor's recent acquisition of virtual routing and firewall vendor Vyatta and virtual network visibility and analytics vendor Vistapointe. The transaction, for an undisclosed sum, is set to close in Brocade's Q2.

"Brocade continues to execute aggressively to capitalise on the disruptive force of software in IP networking," said Brocade chief executive Lloyd Carney.

"Brocade is the number-two datacentre networking vendor worldwide; this acquisition strengthens Brocade's unique position as the adoption of software-centric networking is accelerating. We are thrilled to add SteelApp's widely adopted solution to our portfolio and will invest our existing ADC resources to aggressively advance the road map and extend it into our open Vyatta Platform offering for NFV and SDN."