But no, not for Colt or any other fiber network asset — at least today. Level 3 announced today that it has acquired Black Lotus, in a move to further deepen its network security portfolio.
Black Lotus specializes in Distributed Denial of Service mitigation, which basically means they help those being attacked by botnets to filter out the good traffic from the bad. Level 3 already had some DDoS mitigation capabilities, and Black Lotus will add more scrubbing centers and additional capabilities at the application layer.
The deal is already closed, and details of the transaction were not disclosed — which essentially means it was probably pretty small in a financial sense. But with security becoming ever more important to today’s infrastructure and the potential chaos M2M may bring, it’s the sort of technology and talent acquisition that will help Level 3 keep its current momentum going.
M&A in network and cloud security is hot right now as everyone tries to piece together what they think they are going to need. Just yesterday it was Cisco making a move to buy OpenDNS to bolster its own managed security offerings.
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Categories: Internet Backbones · Mergers and Acquisitions · Security
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They have needed a deal like this since Akamai beat them to Prolexic a couple of years ago.
Man, and Black Lotus was a great little scrappy company, too. I can hear the flushing sounds now.
Though to be fair, it requires far less halfwit integration than buying a telco and ruining that.