F5 Networks has announced that it will acquire its rival Nginx, the company behind the popular open source web server software, for $670m.
Nginx CEO Gus Robertson and cofounders Igor Syoev and Maxim Konovalov will join F5 as employees once the acquisition closes.
While Nginx isn't exactly a household name, its server software is the third most popular in the world after Microsoft and Apache and the internet as we know it wouldn't exist without it.
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Nginx acquisition
According to Robertson, the company has seen 100 percent year-over-year growth every year since 2014 with some of the world's biggest brands including McDonalds and Starbucks relying on it to power their websites.
F5 and Nginix became rivals once the company began to offer its paid premium service Nginx Plus which helps developers build modern applications for AWS, Microsoft Azure and other top cloud computing services. F5 on the other hand, helps business make sure their apps and software are both secure and perform well by discovering and solving bottlenecks.
F5's CEO and President François Locoh-Donou explained his vision for combining the two companies in a press release announcing the acquisition, saying:
“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.”
The Nginx brand will still exist after the acquisition is complete and there are plans to introduce integrations with F5's other security and application monitoring tools.
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