Pulse Secure to acquire Brocade’s vADC business

An affiliate of Pulse Secure has announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire assets associated with the Virtual Application Delivery Controller (vADC) product family from Brocade Communications Systems.

The transaction includes a leased research and development facility in Cambridge, UK and associated customer support and maintenance contracts.

This acquisition, according to the company, will add significant new capabilities to the Pulse Secure Access Platform, allowing it to deliver a complete end-to-end solution designed to reduce cost and complexity and increase security in on premise to virtualised, hybrid, mobile, and web/cloud environments

Originally created as a fully virtualised application delivery controller, the Brocade vADC solution has become one of the most advanced virtual application delivery controllers in the market today. Importantly, the solution was “born virtual” and is a leader in the rapidly growing virtual ADC market. The solution can be quickly and easily provisioned either on premise, in a private/public cloud, or even through cloud service marketplaces such as AWS, Google, and Azure. The Brocade vADC offering is recognised within the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Application Delivery Controllers and is used by many organizations worldwide.

“This acquisition highlights our focus, commitment, and ongoing investment in building the industry’s leading secure access platform. The combined company’s nearly 750 employees post-acquisition will be uniquely focused on delivering secure access for people, devices, things, and services,” said Sudhakar Ramakrishna, CEO, Pulse Secure. “With the addition of Brocade’s vADC solutions, Pulse Secure will be able to deliver secure access to a complete customer application portfolio, from legacy data center applications, to web, cloud, and even mobile applications. We anticipate immediate synergies with our 20,000+ customers today, and we’ll be offering them this expanded capability via our global partner network.”

Kelly Herrell, senior vice president and general manager of software networking at Brocade, said, “Pulse Secure is a great fit for our vADC business and a positive outcome for our employees, customers and partners. Our vADC family is highly complementary to Pulse Secure’s current portfolio, and is expected to enhance Pulse’s capability to deliver a complete end-to-end secure access solution. Upon the close of the transaction, our customers and partners will benefit from access to a broader set of products, as well as Pulse Secure’s planned continued investment in our vADC product roadmap, and its stated commitment to continued support for our existing product lines.”

Pulse Secure intends to hire certain Brocade employees associated with the vADC business.  This team will be working closely together with Pulse Secure after the acquisition closes to ensure continued support for customers.

“In three short years Pulse Secure has expanded and integrated our product portfolio into the market leading ‘Secure Access Suite’. The Secure Access Suite has allowed our partners to change the remote access conversation to a strategic secure access conversation addressing both the data centre and cloud access challenges that enterprises are encountering. Adding the vADC capabilities further strengthen our partners’ ability to deliver the industry’s most complete Secure Access Platform,” said Doug Erickson, VP, WW Partner Sales, Pulse Secure.

Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The transaction is expected to close in late June to mid-July 2017, subject to the satisfaction or waiver of customary closing conditions and prior to the closing of the previously announced acquisition of Brocade by Broadcom Limited.