Citrix Acquires Cedexis to Expand Cloud Reach

Citrix (CTXS) today expanded its networking footprint in the cloud by acquiring Cedexis, a provider of a variety of application traffic management services. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Cedexis provides services such as a content delivery network (CDN), user monitoring, and load balancing by distributing objects dubbed Radar across hundreds of thousands of endpoints around the globe. All those Radar endpoints are then connected back to an implementation of a Domain Name Server (DNS) system running in the cloud on which various Cedexis services are constructed, says Steve Shah, vice president of product management for networking at Citrix.

Citrix will build on that core capability to extend the range of secure digital perimeter products and services it offers across a hybrid IT environment, adds Shah. Today most of the application delivery capabilities Citrix provides are based on the NetScaler family of application delivery controllers (ADCs) that Citrix makes available on-premises.

“It’s not enough to provide an instance of NetScaler running in the cloud,” says Shah. “Customers want access to these services natively in the cloud.”

The Cedexis services are differentiated by their ability to collect data and execute tests using Radar client software to determine the state of the Internet in real time. Cedexis claims it collects measurements from over 14 billion endpoints in addition to data provided by over 130 service providers.

Cedexis then exposes a range of services based on that data via either or a user interface or application programming interface (API) that can be programmatically invoked by developers. The services provided are hosted in data centers in Portland, Ore and Paris, France. Longer term, Shah says Citrix will continue investing in heuristics and machine learning algorithms to both develop new services in addition to enhancing services already being provided.

Prior to being acquired by Citrixm Cedexis had raised a total of $33 million from investors, including Ginko Ventures, Foxconn, Nokia Growth Partners, Citrix Systems Ventures, Advanced Technology Ventures, and Madrona Venture Group.

Usage of CDNs is expected to grow as much as 30 percent on a compound annual basis through 2021 largely because of the growth in video traffic that needs to be optimally distributed based on location. Citrix, however, is also making it clear that it views Cedexis as an opportunity to expand security services in the cloud. DNS services such as those provided by Dyn were the focus of coordinated distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in 2016. Last year Cedexis was the focal point for a similar set of attacks.

Citrix with the acquisition of Cedexis is clearly signaling it plans to challenge a raft of new competitors, including Oracle (ORCL), which acquired Dyn, and Akamai (AKAM), the largest provider of CDN-based services. The challenge and opportunity now is to scale the services that Cedexis enables to be delivered in real time to compete more aggressively against well-heeled rivals that rely more on legacy approaches to application traffic management and security that may not scale as efficiently.

Check out Futuriom's premium research to get a bead on future trends in networking. Our recent SD-WAN Growth Report and SDN 2.0: Monitoring, Analytics, and Automation Report scopes out the trend toward automation of networking equipment, software, and services. Use discount code "FOFU" to get an automatic 10% discount on research licenses.