Acquisition of the Week update from November 2005

Ooohhh...fun stuff out there this week. Citrix made another acquisition, this time targeting web appplication firewall vendor Teros. This coming on the not so distant acquisition of layer 7 load balancer and application acceleration vendor, Netscaler. The Teros offering will be rebranded as the Citrix NetScaler Application Firewall and we expect to see deeper integration between the NetScaler product line and Teros' technology as a result of the acquisition.

This is definitely a leap frog over competitor F5 Networks, who announced (nearly at the same time, coincidence? We don't think so) its Application Security Module (ASM) for its BIG-IP product line. ASM is the same robust application firewall technology found in F5's standalone TrafficShield appliance but it runs as a software module on the BIG-IP platform.

The difference between the two is that Teros has the added edge of protection for Web Services (SOAP), something that F5 has not yet added into its security module. This is a good move for Netscaler, though we've seen performance issues with Teros in the lab that will need to be addressed during integration efforts if the application security functions of the Teros product is to keep up with the traditional performance of the Netscaler product line.Watch closely, we've said for years that application/Web services security and content switches were a natural fit, and we wouldn't be surprised to see more acquisitions by other layer 7 players in the near future.