Oracle, the enterprise services company, announced on Monday that it had bought Dyn, the popular DNS provider that was the subject of a large-scale web attack in October, which paralyzed some of the world’s biggest and very popular websites.
The leading software company plans to add Dyn’s DNS solutions to its bigger cloud computing platform, which already sells and provides a variety of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) products. It is competing against Amazon’s AWS.
The two companies have not revealed any monetary details of the deal but sources put it at a little over $600 million. “We decline further comment,” a spokesperson from Oracle replied to queries from media persons.
Kyle York, chief strategy officer of Dyn, said,”Oracle cloud customers will have unique access to Internet performance information that will help them optimize infrastructure costs, maximize application and website-driven revenue, and manage risk. We are excited to join Oracle and bring even more value to our customers as part of Oracle’s cloud computing platform.”
Oracle’s co-founder Larry Ellison stated in the company’s annual developer conference held in September that it would move aggressively into the market, challenging Amazon’s leadership in businesses where Oracle barely registers now.
This purchase of Dyn has brought Oracle into further competition with Amazon, which has its own domain-name service called Amazon Route 53, even though it is a Dyn customer as well.
Stifel Nicolaus & Co. analyst Brad Reback said, “Buying Dyn seems somewhat consistent with [Oracle’s] desire to build out its infrastructure-as-a-service offerings”.
On Monday, Oracle said the deal would give its clients access to internet performance data, such as how quickly web pages load, which could help them optimize infrastructure costs. It also plans to weave Dyn’s technology into its own offerings, though it offered no specific details.
Thomas Kurian, President, Product Development of Oracle said in a statement, “Oracle already offers enterprise-class IaaS and PaaS for companies building and running Internet applications and cloud services, Dyn’s immensely scalable and global DNS is a critical core component and a natural extension to our cloud computing platform.”
In October Dyn came under distributed denial-of-service attack in which devices connected to the internet flooded Dyn’s computers with junk data, blocking legal users. Dyn said it had seen traffic coming from “tens of millions” of internet addresses. The attack rendered several widely used sites including Netflix, Twitter, PayPal, Airbnb and many others useless for a large parts of a day.
Dynamic Network Services Inc., was started in 2001 as a project by students from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, England. According to Dyn’s website, co-founder Jeremy Hitchcock, who is on Dyn’s board, created the company to be a directory of internet devices for consumers.
