News

F5 Looks to 'Bridge NetOps and DevOps' with Acquisition of NGINX

• By Wendy A. Hernandez
• 03/15/2019

Looking to expand into the open source community and container landscape, cloud and security application services provider F5 Networks Inc. announced Monday (March 11) that it will acquire privately held NGINX Inc. for a total of $670 million.

"F5's acquisition of NGINX strengthens our growth trajectory by accelerating our software and multi-cloud transformation," said François Locoh-Donou, president & CEO of F5, in a prepared satement. "By bringing F5's world-class application security and rich application services portfolio for improving performance, availability, and management together with NGINX's leading software application delivery and API management solutions, unparalleled credibility and brand recognition in the DevOps community, and massive open source user base, we bridge the divide between NetOps and DevOps with consistent application services across an enterprise's multi-cloud environment."

According to the announcement, F5 plans to enhance the current NGINX offerings with F5 security solutions, as well as integrate F5 cloud-native innovations with NGINX's software load-balancing technology. In doing so, the company hopes to accelerate F5's time to market of application services for modern, containerized applications. F5 also plans to scale NGINX selling opportunities to the enterprise by leveraging the F5 global sales force, channel infrastructure and partner ecosystem.

With open source being a core part of F5's "multi-cloud strategy and a driver for F5's next phase of innovation," the company says it's "committed to continued innovation and increasing investment in the NGINX open source project to empower NGINX's widespread user communities."

"NGINX and F5 share the same mission and vision. We both believe applications are at the heart of driving digital transformation. And we both believe that an end-to-end application infrastructure -- one that spans from code to customer -- is needed to deliver apps across a multi-cloud environment," said Gus Robertson, CEO of NGINX, ina prepared statement. "I'm excited to continue this journey by adding the power of NGINX's open source innovation to F5's ADC leadership and enterprise reach. F5 gains depth with solutions designed for DevOps, while NGINX gains breadth with access to tens of thousands of customers and partners."

The NGINX brand will be maintained, along with NGINX operations in San Francisco, Calif., once the aqcuisition is complete. F5 says Robertson will report to Locoh-Donou as part of the senior management team, while founders Igor Sysoev and Maxim Konovalov will also join F5 and continue to lead NGINX.

For more transaction details, go here.