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F5 Networks, specialist in network traffic management, is taking over Shape Security for approximately 1 billion dollars. That American company is known for its fraud detection platform for airlines, banks, government agencies and retailers.

With the acquisition, F5 Networks wants to improve its application services, according to Silicon Angle. Together, the parties want to become a leader in the field of end-to-end application protection. Shape’s software is used by five of the largest credit card issuers and eight of the top twelve customers of U.S. banks. Every day, Shape’s solution counteracts more than a billion fake transactions.

“Shape’s machine learning and AI-powered capabilities will scale and extend F5’s broad portfolio of application services and expand our ability to optimize and protect customers’ applications in an increasingly complex multi-cloud world,” F5 CEO François Locoh-Donou states.

“We look forward to the opportunity to deeply integrate into F5’s platform for application delivery and security — F5 provides the optimum traffic flow insertion point for Shape’s industry-leading online fraud and abuse prevention solutions,” Derek Smith, Shape’s co-founder and CEO, said.

Ambitions

In an email to employees, Locoh-Donou says the F5 acquisition will help accelerate the transition from a “maker of hardware for customers’ local data centers” to a “software provider for customers running their workloads on public cloud infrastructure. “

The acquisition will be completed in the first quarter of 2020, depending on regulatory approval. Once the acquisition is official, the company expects its software revenue growth to increase from about 35 to 40 percent to about 60 to 70 percent.

NGINX

Last March, F5 Networks also acquired NGINX for an amount of 670 million dollars. NGINX is the company behind the eponymous open source web server. The acquisition strengthens F5 in the field of multi-cloud implementations.