Most of Boston-based Threat Stack's roughly 100-person team will join Seattle-based app security and delivery company F5 Networks, Inc. (Nasdaq: FFIV), Mark Weiner, F5's vice president of product marketing, told the Business Journal.
F5 announced it would acquire Threat Stack, a cloud security company, earlier in September. Weiner said conversations with clients spurred F5 to pursue the acquisition.
"A lot of newer applications are becoming more and more cloud-native," Weiner said. "They were built for the cloud to operate in a cloud-native model, and there's additional security and visibility requirements you have to properly secure those workloads in that environment."
Weiner added that F5 now has 6,380 total employees, over 1,400 of whom are based in the Puget Sound region. He didn't put an exact estimate on how many employees the company plans to have in a year, but said F5 "is experiencing strong growth."
The Threat Stack employees who are joining F5 will stay where they are, and F5 has been able to stay productive while working remotely during the pandemic, Weiner said.
F5 is paying about $68 million in cash for Threat Stack, and the companies expect the deal to close before the end of the year. F5 expects Threat Stack to add about $15 million in revenue for fiscal year 2022.
“Applications are the backbone of today’s modern businesses, and protecting them is mission critical for our customers,” Haiyan Song, executive vice president of security at F5, said in a news release announcing the acquisition. “Threat Stack brings technology and talent that will strengthen F5’s security capabilities and further our adaptive applications vision with broader cloud observability and actionable security insights for customers.”
F5 was founded in 1996 and went public in 1999. In its third quarter fiscal 2021 earnings, F5 reported $652 million in quarterly revenue. F5 acquired the California-based cloud company Volterra in January for $500 million. Weiner joined F5 as part of the Volterra acquisition. He was the chief marketing officer at Volterra before it was acquired.
"It's been an excellent integration effort," Weiner said. "The pace with which Volterra has been integrating with F5 and adding value to customers is exemplary."
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