Faster website specialists snapped up by Riverbed

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San Francisco-based network equipment maker Riverbed Technology says it has bought Wellington-based Aptimize to enhance its web optimisation portfolio.

Riverbed helps companies to move file and email servers from remote offices to data centres.

Aptimize, founded by Edward Robinson of Seatoun, and Derek Watson of Johnsonville, specialised in doubling the speed at which websites could be accessed, without extra software code or hardware.

Watson was the inventor and main developer of the company's "website accelerator" technology which consolidated and compressed files so pages were quicker for visitors to download.

A 27 per cent stake in Aptimize was sold for $1 million in 2009, and the company which took out the Cyber Gold prize at the Gold Awards this year.

The company's first big investor was Wellington-based Microsoft developer Intergen, and Intergen managing director Tony Stewart still held a significant stake when it was sold.

Deal terms were not disclosed, but the company also bought a British company, Zeus Technology, for US$110 million ($130 million) to strengthen its traffic management business.

It expected that deal to break even in the second half of this year and add to earnings, beginning in 2012.

It said Zeus had over 1500 customers, and Aptimize had more than 150 customers. A Riverbed executive vice-president, Eric Wolford, said its products allowed information technology workers to better manage and accelerate performance in public, private and hybrid clouds for application and storage workloads.

"Our acquisitions of Zeus and Aptimize extend our ability to more comprehensively address these and other performance problems," he told shareholders.

"Aptimize provides a significantly different approach to improving web application performance.

"Aptimize's technology reorders, merges and resizes content, essentially transforming it in real time in order to deliver the application up to four times faster".

The technology was for web applications used internally in corporations, or externally, in public-facing websites, and Aptimize had some key customers including Disney, Google, Ingram Micro, Microsoft and Raytheon.

- NZPA