Juniper Pays $95 Million for Virtualization Security Provider Altor Networks

Juniper Networks Inc. said it has plunked down $95 million for Altor Networks Inc., a privately-held, three-year old provider of virtualization security technology based in Redwood Shores, CA, in which it invested earlier this year.

Juniper's purchase price reflected the shares in Altor it already owns. The deal already has closed, officials said.

The deal with Altor is Juniper’s second acquisition in a month, coming on the heels of its purchase in mid-November of Trapeze Networks, a provider of enterprise wireless LANs, for some $152 million. That transaction is expected to close before the end of this year.

Juniper officials said that Altor’s solutions address the business community’s increasing concern over cloud security as reliance increases on virtual servers for critical applications. Altor offers a hypervisor-based firewall, on-board intrusion detection, network visibility, monitoring and reporting for compliance.

"Juniper is excited to acquire one of the industry's leading virtualization security vendors and the extremely talented team that built it," said Mark Bauhaus, Juniper executive vice president and general manager, Service Layer Technologies.

"This acquisition will extend our leadership in data center and cloud security and will enable customers to deploy a consistent set of security services across their physical and virtual infrastructure, while delivering lowest total cost of ownership," he said.

Amir Ben-Efraim, Altor chief executive and co-founder, said that the two companies think alike on data center and cloud security.

"Altor has led the virtualization security market in innovation, defense-in-depth and performance," said Ben-Efraim.

"Today, we join forces with Juniper, which shares a common vision for securing data centers and the cloud, and together we look forward to extending our leadership in the VM security market,” he said. “We are excited about the opportunity to leverage Juniper's world-class organization and market-leading products to deliver tightly integrated, feature-rich security solutions to customers."