San Francisco-based network equipment maker Riverbed
Technology Inc says it has bought Wellington-based Aptimize
Ltd to enhance its web optimisation portfolio.
Riverbed helps companies to move file and email servers from
remote offices to data centres.
Aptimize, founded by Edward Robinson of Seatoun, and Derek
Watson of Johnsonville, specialised in doubling the speed at
which websites could be accessed, without extra software code
or hardware.
Mr Watson was the inventor and main developer of the
company's "website accelerator" technology which consolidated
and compressed files so pages were quicker for visitors to
download.
A 27 percent stake in Aptimize was sold for $1 million in
2009, and the company which took out the Cyber Gold prize at
the Gold Awards this year.
The company's first big investor was Wellington-based
Microsoft developer Intergen, and Intergen managing director
Tony Stewart still held a significant stake when it was sold.
Deal terms were not disclosed in the announcement statement,
but separately the company also bought a British company,
Zeus Technology, for $US110 million in cash to strengthen its
traffic management business.
It expected that deal to break even in the second half of
2011 and add to earnings, beginning in 2012.
It said Zeus had over 1500 customers, and Aptimize had more
than 150 customers.
A Riverbed executive vice president, Eric Wolford, said its
products allowed information technology workers to better
manage and accelerate performance in public, private and
hybrid clouds for application and storage workloads.
"Our acquisitions of Zeus and Aptimize extend our ability to
more comprehensively address these and other performance
problems," he told shareholders.
"Aptimize provides a significantly different approach to
improving web application performance.
"This technology is often referred to as web content
optimisation.
"Aptimize's technology reorders, merges and resizes content,
essentially transforming it in real time in order to deliver
the application up to four times faster".
The technology was for web applications used internally in
corporations, such as SharePoint, or externally, in
public-facing websites, and Aptimize had some key customers
including Disney, Google, Ingram Micro, Microsoft and
Raytheon.
Riverbed reported a second-quarter net profit of $US11.3
million, or 7c a share, compared with $US6.6 million, or 4c a
share, in the year ago quarter.
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