Mazu

Riverbed gets Mazu Networks for a bargain

WAN optimization heavyweight Riverbed Technology gobbled up Mazu Networks this week for just $25 million in cash. Mazu is a privately held company that sells network behavior analysis (NBA) tools that analyze the interaction between users, applications and systems. Mazu Profiler, the company’s flagship product, is used for security monitoring, but like many NBA vendors, customers have been increasingly using it for monitoring and analyzing the performance of rich critical applications like voice and video.

Riverbed apparently is acquiring Mazu so that it can better evaluate the state of application performance over a customer’s wide area network. The comapny’s press release explains that Mazu’s ability to give “a holistic, real-time view of application usage and performance” is critical to understanding the “application environment and taking the right steps to validate and ensure delivery of business-critical applications across the wide area network.”

Riverbed’s cash payment of $25 million for Mazu is definitely a bargain. According to GigaOm, venture capitalists have invested $40 million into the company. The blog peHub puts the VC figure at $47 million. The VC firms might get their money back if Mazu performs for Riverbed. The terms of the sale include an additional payment of up to $22 million based on the sales performance of Mazu in the 12 months following the closing of the deal.

MacGyver challenges network pros at Interop

One of the more entertaining exhibits on the Interop Las Vegas 2008 show floor this year was Mazu’s “MacGyver Challenge,” which pitted attendees against timed puzzles which could be solved with the help of the “Mazu Profiler.” Mazu tweaked some kids’ games to represent network problems. MacGyver sported a great mullet. Check it out.