Thursday Roundup: FirstLight, Fusion, F5 Networks

A customer win, a call delayed, and a software acquisition:

FirstLight Fiber picked up a new enterprise customer on its southern frontier in New York’s Westchester County. The Century Country Club upgraded its infrastructure with FirstLight’s bandwidth late last year, significantly boosting connectivity for its members. FirstLight brought its metro fiber footprint into Westchester County three years ago with an organic expansion aimed in part at the wireless backhaul opportunities in the area, and it’s good to see them winning customers in the area.

Fusion is postponing its Q4 earnings call at the last minute, as apparently the audit process is going into overtime. The company’s acquisition of Birch last year created “significant additional financial reporting and internal control obligations” that they are still resolving. Fusion thus becomes the latest of a long list of network infrastructure players to hit some sort of speed bump with the public markets this winter. The company expects to have everything done by the end of March though.

F5 Networks is making a signficant move deeper into the software business. The cloud and application delivery specialist has announced an agreement to acquire NGINX for $670M. NGINX develops and maintains the server software this website runs on, as well as a variety of other related offerings used to keep services on the internet running. The deal adds significant DevOps talent to F5’s existing NetOps expertise.

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Categories: Cloud Computing · Mergers and Acquisitions · Metro fiber · Software