F5 Networks is acquiring Nginx, a top provider of open-source web server software, in a $670 million deal aimed at boosting its app management and delivery solutions for enterprises that use multiple cloud computing platforms.
Nginx’s web server is the third most widely used in the world, behind only Microsoft and Apache and ahead of Google. The company has also introduced a paid premium service that helps developers build modern applications for cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
F5, an industry leader in app infrastructure for network and security teams, said the acquisition of Nginx fits its strategy to help enterprises manage their apps wherever they may be — their own servers, the cloud, or even across multiple clouds.
“There’s no company today that offers application services across all those environments,” F5 CEO François Locoh-Donou told Business Insider.
Nginx CEO Gus Robertson said the companies have complementary strengths, noting that Nginx provides app infrastructure for developer and DevOps teams. “Our web and application server, microservices, and API management solutions complement the application management, application security, and infrastructure security solutions from F5,” he said.
According to Business Insider, well over half of the busiest websites in the world, including ones operated by McDonald’s and Starbucks, rely on Nginx software.
Robertson told the publication last year that the company’s business had seen 100% year-over-year growth every year since 2014, with companies coming to Nginx to help make their websites load faster and more efficiently.
“Combined, F5 and NGINX provide a new, end-to-end set of application offerings that bridge the divide between NetOps and DevOps. The result? Customers can spend more time focused on their apps, and less time worrying about the underlying infrastructure,” Robertson said Monday in a blog post.
GeekWire said the deal was “a huge one for F5 … It brings more of the application infrastructure under F5’s umbrella, as the Seattle company seeks to make the transition from being a hardware company to one that emphasizes software and services for building apps that work across multiple cloud usage scenarios.”