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Kris Beevers
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Kris Beevers on
October 3, 2019

Dell and Cisco Invest in NS1’s Vision to Manage the World’s Application Traffic

NS1 brings automation, velocity, and security to modern application development and delivery.

Enterprise infrastructure is evolving faster than ever before. Emerging technologies make it possible to spin up microservices and cloud instances in minutes. DevOps teams are churning out code 40 times faster than legacy production environments. New edge and serverless architectures are taking computing out of the data center and closer to devices enabling global real-time applications. Those organizations not born in the cloud-native era face the additional challenge of connecting legacy applications with new technology in the never-ending race to meet user demands for performance while driving efficiency and security.

The result: modern application infrastructure is dynamic, distributed and increasingly complex. And at the center of it all, we find technologies that have existed for decades—DNS, DHCP and IP address management (DDI)—that are ripe for disruption. It is at this intersection that NS1 has aggressively innovated to meet modern infrastructure demands. By creating solutions that are application-centric and data-driven, NS1 has become a critical tool that brings automation, velocity, and security to modern application development and delivery.


Today, we’re proud to announce a huge validation of NS1’s leadership in application traffic, DNS and DDI.

We have raised a $33M Series C investment round, led by Dell Technologies Capital and joined by Cisco Investments, with participation from NS1’s existing investors. With this financing, NS1 is now backed by two of the world’s most prevalent and trusted enterprise IT companies, with which we share deeply aligned visions and product strategies. Our solutions address key enterprise application delivery and networking challenges that complement and integrate with Dell and Cisco’s offerings. In partnership with Dell and Cisco, we gain leverage to rapidly enable every enterprise to take advantage of NS1’s uniquely strategic technologies to drive IT modernization, efficiency, performance, and security.

The future of the application traffic stack

At NS1, our vision is to manage the world’s application traffic.

Enterprises worldwide are competing to deliver the best user experiences possible. For internal teams and services, application performance directly affects operational and business velocity, and for end-users, it is one of the most important factors in customer satisfaction, brand reputation, and revenue growth. As companies strive to deliver optimal experiences, we have seen a rapidly growing focus on application traffic management. Innovation at key points of leverage in the application delivery path can deliver enormous results. In pursuit of this gigantic market opportunity, we are laser-focused on making the modern integrated application traffic stack a reality.

NS1 solutions already unlock the strategic value of DNS and other key points of leverage throughout the stack to solve huge application traffic optimization and network management problems in the critical paths of major enterprises in every sector. We are giving traffic, site reliability engineering and IT operations teams the tools they need to optimize, secure and analyze end-to-end application traffic across highly dynamic and distributed infrastructure footprints.

Unlike nearly every other organization in the application traffic path today, NS1’s technologies credibly unlock value across all facets of infrastructure. Our cloud-based technologies drive performance, security, and efficiency for complex global internet applications, and our software stack is simultaneously deployed inside the application environment to drive velocity, efficiency, and end-to-end integration for both next-generation and longstanding use cases for DNS and DDI. We are making the entire stack smarter, more secure and more efficient to manage and are creating huge leverage for our customers.


The modern application traffic stack, powered by NS1, enables application teams to achieve world-class global delivery performance and reliability; better leverage IT spend with real-time, data-driven efficiency; unlock tremendous engineering velocity, and secure the most critical application asset—the domain—against complex and evolving threats.

Seizing the opportunity

At the same time, the legacy players in these spaces have lost relevance, resulting in consolidation and slowing innovation that is driving enterprises to rethink their strategies for DNS, DDI, and other core components of the traffic and network stack. Neustar’s acquisition of UltraDNS and Verisign’s DNS contracts, Oracle’s acquisition and subsequent end-of-life announcement for Dyn DNS, and private equity ownership of legacy DDI appliance vendors Infoblox and BlueCat, have left huge gaps for independent, best-in-class products well aligned with automation, multi-cloud, DevOps, and other drivers of infrastructure change. NS1’s purpose built-platform—the only one in the industry to span cloud and on-prem use cases with a true cloud-native, API-first approach—is uniquely positioned to meet the performance, efficiency, and security requirements of rapidly modernizing IT teams.

Today, NS1 sits in the critical traffic path for hundreds of the world’s most trusted organizations. Nearly 500 major brands—many of which you interact with every day—depend upon NS1’s technologies to drive revenue, business operations, automation, and user experience. LinkedIn, USA Today Networks, Dropbox, The Guardian, DocuSign, Pitney Bowes, and hundreds more trust NS1 with their critical business applications. Across our customers, NS1 powers over two million domains—chances are you interact with NS1’s technologies every day as you browse the web or use apps on your phone.



Investing aggressively in the future of application traffic

With today’s announcement, NS1 will invest even more aggressively in our application traffic technologies to create strategic value for every application and every enterprise by unlocking leverage at key control points in the traffic stack. As always, our continued innovation and growth will be driven by deep engagement with our industry-leading customers and partners, now including Dell and Cisco.

We are growing our team rapidly, in every function, across the globe. Do you want to be part of the brilliant team pursuing NS1’s unique vision and changing the industry? Join us and be part of our journey - we will double our team by the end of 2020. Visit our Career Center to see openings around the world.

To hear other perspectives on Dell and Cisco’s Series C investment in NS1, read the blog posts from new NS1 board member Tyler Jewell, Managing Director at Dell Technologies Capital, and Prasad Parthasarathi, Global Head of Cybersecurity Venture Capital at Cisco Investments.