Juniper Networks acquires Altor, expands network security offerings

While most people fret about the hundreds of dollars now on their credit cards for the holiday season, Juniper has dropped $95M for Altor Networks, a virtualization security vendor. This partnership is preceded by the companies’ previous involvement with one another, providing virtualization services and technology to the enterprise. Mark Bauhaus, executive VP at Juniper Networks, says that the acquisition is part of Juniper’s goal of expanding its data center and cloud security offerings:

[It] will enable customers to deploy a consistent set of security services across their physical and virtual infrastructure, while delivering lower TCO.

This is Juniper’s second acquisition in the past two months, after the $152M acquisition of Wi-Fi vendor Trapeze Networks. The goal is to expand what executive VP of Fabric and Switching Technologies David Yen calls its “end-to-end networking product portfolio.” And it seems that joining forces with Altor is a means to that end, adding introspection technology as well as policy and compliance aspects for the entire enterprise or virtualized data center infrastructure.

With competitors such as VMware and Cisco also creating extensions from physical to virtualized systems, is the acquisition enough for Juniper to keep up?

Melanie Yarbrough is the assistant community editor at ITKnowledgeExchange.com. Follow her on Twitter or send her an email at Melanie@ITKnowledgeExchange.com.