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Kris Beevers
Posted by
Kris Beevers on
November 30, 2016

Oracle's Acquisition of Dyn: What it Means for the DNS & Traffic Management Space

Last week, Oracle announced it was acquiring Dyn.  Here are a few quick thoughts.

First and most importantly, I'd like to congratulate the Dyn team on a tremendous outcome.  They have worked long, hard, and intelligently to achieve this result, and in the process have pushed ahead the managed DNS industry, helping drive acceptance of the managed DNS model and paving the way for newer providers to enter the space.  We're grateful to be in the industry alongside a company like Dyn, which is truly passionate about operational excellence and driving core internet technologies forward -- just as we are here at NS1.

It's easy to get lost in the day to day of a competitive, fast moving ecosystem like the DNS and traffic management space.  And make no mistake: at NS1 we compete hard with Dyn, along with other major DNS vendors.  But at the same time, we are lucky to have maintained a mostly positive "coopetition" style relationship, one which has benefited the industry, customers, and the internet.  For example, both NS1 and Dyn have suffered complex attacks against our infrastructures this year -- and in each case, we've shared information and ideas that have improved both platforms' resiliency and made our customers better off.  As Dyn navigates its transition into Oracle, we hope these interactions will continue, and we at NS1 will continue to drive efforts for cooperation across the DNS ecosystem.

Oracle's acquisition of Dyn is, foremost, a validation of the criticality of DNS and traffic management for today's applications and architectures.

DNS is in many ways the glue that binds together modern cloud infrastructures and drives the digital transformation efforts underway at most major enterprises.  As audiences have become more global, and applications more dynamic, DNS and DNS based traffic management are enabling organizations to maximize performance and operational efficiency across increasingly complex environments.  At the same time, as the recent DDoS attacks against Dyn have shown, DNS infrastructures are being targeted -- and for most companies, DNS is both an overlooked point of failure, and an underappreciated mechanism for managing resiliency across application systems.

For all these reasons, now more than ever, there's a tremendous opportunity to address the challenges and opportunities in the DNS ecosystem.  Oracle is stepping into the fray with their acquisition.

At NS1, we are already here, and we are leading innovators in the space.  Now, as one of the only independent companies fully focused on addressing modern DNS, traffic management, and application delivery use cases, our focus is renewed by the Dyn acquisition and we will accelerate our efforts -- the ecosystem needs NS1 to continue to disrupt the industry and move the bar on the resilience, dynamism, and flexibility of the managed DNS technologies used by the largest properties on the internet.

We'll also continue to disrupt the industry in “softer” ways.  Our customers consistently tell us that one of NS1's most important differentiators isn't technical at all -- it's our remarkably responsive and deep customer support that is focused on solving problems, not on upselling across an unfocused product set.  Enterprise customers demand expert-level technical support and are turned off by sales-heavy interactions with a vendor that should be focused on addressing technology challenges, not pitching complex service orders with unnecessary add-ons.  As more and more of the key vendors in our space are incorporated into labyrinthian cloud and software companies selling "across the stack", we at NS1 will remain focused on providing the most advanced DNS and traffic management technology in the market and helping the operators of the most critical applications on the internet navigate the challenges in this linchpin component of their stack.

We're energized by all the recent movement in the DNS ecosystem, and thrilled to be driving this critical technology forward.  So, to our friends (or is it frienemies?) at Dyn -- congratulations on this milestone, and we'll see you on the field as the next chapter of our industry unfolds.