Zeus Acquires Application Firewall Specialist Art Of Defence

controller virtualization infrastructure

"After partnering with Art of Defence for several years, we are excited to take the next step in fully integrating the industry's most robust (distributed Web application firewall) into our platform," said Jim Darragh, Zeus' CEO, in a statement.

Financial details of the transaction weren't disclosed. Zeus, based in Cambridge, U.K., and with a U.S. office in Santa Clara, Calif., has been a past member of CRN's Emerging Vendors list thanks to its application delivery controller (ADC) software, and its growing Zeus Accredited Partner Program.

A lot of its growth has come with cloud infrastructure vendors looking for virtual ADCs, particularly because Zeus supports a broad range of hypervisors. Zeus' technology is available as-a-service through a number of cloud platforms, including Amazon, Rackspace, Joyent and Terremark.

Zeus and Art of Defence have partnered for more than two years; Zeus' Application Firewall Module, which protects Web applications either on-premise or via the cloud, is built on technology licensed from Art of Defence. Both Zeus and Art of Defence products, according to Zeus, can run on any virtualization or cloud platform.

Under the terms of the acquisition, Art of Defence's Regensburg, Germany-based headquarters becomes a Zeus regional headquarters. All of Art of Defence's employees, including its co-founders, CEO Georg Hess and CTO Alexander Meisel, will join Zeus. Zeus will integrate Art of Defence's flagship Hyperguard SaaS product line into its own portfolio, but also continue to offer it as a standalone product.

Art of Defence was founded in 2005 and has a U.S. office in San Francisco.