Oracle to buy DNS, cloud infrastructure provider Dyn

Oracle plans to acquire internet performance and DNS provider Dyn in an effort to pump up its cloud-based offerings and challenge infrastructure and platform service leaders like Amazon and Microsoft.

Dyn, in the news last month when it was targeted in a massive distributed denial-of-service attack, operates a global network that makes 40 billion traffic optimization decisions each day for more than 3,500 enterprise customers, including Netflix and Twitter.

Dyn monitors and optimizes internet applications and cloud services with the goal of delivering deliver faster access and reduced page-load times. Dyn's services will give Oracle a one-stop shop for enterprise customers looking for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS), Oracle said in a press release Monday.

Oracle has made an aggressive play in the cloud in recent months, with Executive Chairman Larry Ellison promising in September to give Amazon's AWS "serious competition." Some observers have questioned whether the company can catch up to Amazon and Microsoft, however.

Oracle has invested heavily in its cloud platform and has ambitions to be a market leader, but its strength right now lies in cloud support of its own applications, said Paul Miller, a senior analyst at Forrester.

"Oracle's cloud makes most sense to customers already heavily invested in Oracle's ecosystem of tools and applications," Miller said.

Many existing Oracle customers also have a big investment in their own data centers, and that isn't likely to change for several years, Miller added. So Oracle "mostly tells a hybrid cloud story in which some workloads run in public clouds, and others run on a customer's premises, in a customer's chosen co-location facility, or wherever," he said.

In the hybrid service model, the Dyn acquisition makes sense, Miller said. Dyn's network optimization services can help Oracle speed up its own network traffic and help the company and its customers "optimize the flow of data between Oracle's data centers and a customer's own facilities," he added. "That optimization makes data flow faster and also saves everyone money."

Customers should keep an eye on Oracle, he said, as re company and other cloud providers chase Amazon and Microsoft,

"With a clear commitment to public cloud platforms and a strong history of success, clients would be foolish to write off this provider," Forrester said in a report last month. "For those already invested in Oracle’s platform and applications, there may be no better choice."

Oracle declined to comment on the acquisition and didn't release terms of the deal.