November 21, 2016
By Sam Del Rowe, contributing writer

Oracle Acquires Dyn

Oracle today announced its acquisition of Dyn, a cloud-based Internet performance management company whose platform monitors, controls, and optimizes Internet applications and infrastructure to deliver faster access, reduce page load times, and provide higher overall satisfaction for end users.

With more than 3,500 enterprise customers, Dyn has several noteworthy clients, including CNBC, Netflix, and Twitter. The company's global network powers 40 billion traffic optimization decisions daily, and its domain name system (DNS) for Internet performance management (IPM) tool—which translates domain names into IP addresses to help IT professionals reach the correct online services when entering URLs—will extend the capabilities of Oracle's cloud computing platform, with the goal of creating a comprehensive infrastructure-as-a-service (IasS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solution.

Dyn offers a number of solutions besides its DNS for IPM tool. The active failover feature acts as a precaution against outages. When an outage is detected, traffic from the user's website is automatically rerouted to a preconfigured alternate endpoint. Additionally, traffic directing capabilities rely on geolocation technologies to rouet queries to the most efficient endpoints. Furthermore, the dynamic steering feature directs traffic to the most relevant endpoints.

Dyn also provides a number of intelligence capabilities. Its Internet intelligence solution monitors cloud and content delivery network providers to derive information on the availability, reachability, and performance of users' Internet infrastructure. In addition, the network Internet intelligence feature monitors how network changes affect Internet connectivity, while the transit Internet intelligence feature provides updates on the routing of data across the Internet. Internet alerts notify users of significant outages, instabilities, and attacks, with the goal of minimizing security issues and maximizing Internet connectivity.

Thomas Kurian, president of product development at Oracle, in a statement described Dyn's DNS tool as "critical":

"Oracle already offers enterprise-class IaaS and PaaS for companies building and running Internet applications and cloud services. Dyn's immensely scalable and global DNS is a critical core component and a natural extension to our cloud computing platform."

Kyle York, chief strategy officer at Dyn, emphasized in a statement that the acquisition will provide Oracle customers with new ways to improve their operations:

"Oracle cloud customers will have unique access to Internet performance information that will help them optimize infrastructure costs, maximize application and website-driven revenue, and manage risk. We are excited to join Oracle and bring even more value to our customers as part of Oracle's cloud computing platform."