Fortinet to acquire Coyote Point

Fortinet has entered into a definitive merger agreement to acquire Coyote Point Systems, a privately-held provider of application delivery, load balancing and acceleration solutions.

“As more enterprises turn to the cloud, data centers are going to require higher performance solutions coupled with strong security,” said John Grady, research manager at IDC. “In this environment, security and application delivery must work hand-in-hand, to ensure quality of service while still preventing attacks. This acquisition places Fortinet in a unique position to deliver on both aspects in one solution.”

No immediate changes will be made to Coyote Point product offerings, customer support and channel programs or any existing ADC products that Fortinet markets. Future products and solution offerings will be announced upon their availability.

Application delivery controllers (ADCs) provide functions that optimize enterprise application environments. The market evolved from the load-balancing systems that were specifically developed to ensure the availability and scalability of websites.

Enterprises use ADCs to optimize reliability, end-user performance, data center resource use and security for a variety of enterprise applications. According to industry forecasts, the annual end-user spending for Application Delivery Controllers will exceed $2 billion for 2013.

“This acquisition complements Fortinet’s Network Security strategy and allows the company and our channel partners to accelerate and further deliver on our vision of providing complete and comprehensive security into the enterprise,” said Ken Xie, founder, president and chief executive officer of Fortinet. “Furthermore, we expect this acquisition will generate synergy among existing Fortinet products, including our FortiGate®, FortiBalancer, FortiDDoS and FortiWeb platforms.”