NGINX enters into a new era

NGINX, the leader in web services optimization, delivered a very good session during The IT Press Tour a few days ago after the F5 Networks acquisition has been announced last week.

NGINX, founded in 2011, has raised so far $103M and its revenue doubles every year during the 5 last consecutive years. This acquisition means a ratio of 6.5 on investment and approx. $2.6M per employee largely above the famous value of $250k.

One of the main reason F5 picks NGINX is the strong open source software built by the original team and the wide worldwide adoption perfectly illustrated by references such Instagram, Pinterest, Netflix, Eventbrite, Box, Dropbox or Airbnb... Today more than 375M web sites operate thanks to NGINX and 67% of the highest traffic sites. In a nutshell it's about technology - performance, scalability, concurrency and API - installed base and finally a leading company.

Launched in August 2013, NGINX Plus is the natural extension of NGINX open source plus specific enterprise features.

Coming from the network infrastructure layers, F5 recognizes its need to add applications infrastructure to become a global end-to-end applications services provider for today and future worlds.

There is a real culture conflict as F5 is a commercial enterprise company and NGINX an open source player but the market opportunity and associated addressable market are greater then the risk according to each executive team. F5 confirms its commitment to NGINX open source projects.

The two companies concentrate their effort towards applications services and infrastructure in a multi-cloud environments. Next steps will be interesting to see and how F5 and NGINX promote this synergy on the market.