Arbor's Ellacoya acquisition will help ISPs offer differentiated services

Stuart Corner
Sunday, 20 January 2008 23:57

IT Industry - Deals

Arbor Networks is to acquire Ellacoya Networks, and the synergies between their technologies, combined with Arbor's pervasiveness in carrier networks promises to make it much easier for carriers and ISPs to control and differentiate broadband delivered services. Arbor Networks claims to protect more than 70 percent of the world's Internet service providers' networks from security threats such as DDoS attacks, botnets and worms as well as network issues such as traffic and routing instability. It "give customers a single, unified view into their networks' performance, helping them quickly detect anomalous behaviour, mitigate threats and enforce policy."

Arbor also maintains what it claims is the world's first globally scoped threat analysis network. Atlas, which uses its large installed base of equipment to detect and report new Internet threats from around the world.

Arbor's technology is implemented in a series of appliances that can be installed throughout a carrier's network to monitor IP traffic: in the core, the enterprise edge or the consumer edge (monitoring DSLAMs in exchanges). It enables a large telco to offer a managed service to a smaller carrier, or to a large enterprise customer:  thce customers get visibility of their traffic on the carrier's network though web portal access into the Arbor appliances.

Ellacoya is a specialist in deep packet inspection (DPI)  technlogy. Its equipment is also employed at the broadband edge, and in peering links, to provide visibility into traffic along with the ability to prioritise traffic on a per-subscriber and per-application basis. The technology can be used to deliver new products and services, such as IPTV, digital video and on-demand quality-assured broadband services. Ellacoya claims that its technology is deployed in over 160 service provider networks world-wide, including some of the world's largest carrier IP networks.

Gerald Wesel, chairman and CEO of Ellacoya Networks, said: "Arbor's flow-based security and network-wide analysis, combined with Ellacoya's DPI capabilities, will provide customers with the intelligence they need to deliver personalised next-generation services that are the key to customer satisfaction and future revenue."