Network security and load balancing vendor A10 Networks is reportedly up for sale, according to a Reuters report. The company's products are sold to optimise and protect networks across data centres, service providers and enterprises.
Since its 2014 IPO, the company's share price has dropped by almost two-thirds, and it has faced fierce competition from the likes of Citrix and F5 Networks. And this in a market that has been negatively affected by the corporate rush to the cloud.
By using cloud-hosted services, customers don't have to spend as much of their IT budgets on on-premise network load balancing and data security, or indeed building their own data centres that have to be closely managed with technology from the likes of A10.
F5 Networks considered its own private sale a couple of years ago but no deal was ever made. Reuters said A10's sale consideration was at “an early stage”, and that there was no certainty that a deal would be reached, according to unnamed sources.
For the third quarter ended 30 September, A10 posted sales that fell over 2% year-over-year to $60.5m, although it did cut its net loss from $2.25m to $1.8m.
Earlier this year, A10 brought in ex-Cisco and Juniper Networks stalwart Anthony Webb as vice president of sales for EMEA. He was tasked with growing A10’s sales operations and leading the company’s channel strategy across the region.
A10's products across its Thunder offering include the application delivery controller (ADC), threat protection system (TPS) and carrier grade networking (CGN) lines, all available through its Affinity Partner Programme.
