UltraDNS Buys Customers

DNS services provider UltraDNS announced that it has purchased rival Nominum's DNS hosting customer base and the Secondary DNS property.

by Michael Singer of siliconvalley.internet.com [October 14, 2002]

Financial terms of the deal are being kept at a mum, but San Mateo-based UltraDNS said the purchase from Nominum includes the Secondary DNS property as well as several country code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) and several generic TLDs (gTLDs) including .no (Norway), .lx (Luxembourg), .ie (Ireland), and .coop.

UltraDNS's non-BIND based Managed DNS Service already handles all DNS resolutions for the .info domain and is the official ICANN-recommended resolver for all .org properties. The company's customer list includes the likes of Oracle, MSN Hotmail, Forbes.com, Corio, and Handspring.

The sale follows a strategic decision Tuesday by Nominum to exit the outsourced management business and concentrate on developing a new batch of software products for DNS and DHCP.

"This enables Nominum to focus on delivering our best-in-class technology for IP address infrastructure in the form of commercially-licensed software," said Nominum CEO Chris Risley.

Nominum's new Dynamic Configuration Server (DCS) software is a DHCP platform designed for large-scale environments. The company says unlike other DHCP servers that can take up to an hour to re-start after a power outage, its DCS eliminates the need to stop a DHCP server to change its configuration. DCS can also scale to millions of concurrent leases

"DCS was designed and written from its inception to out-perform all other DHCP servers. Performance in this case means speed, scalability, and availability," said Nominum founder and CTO David Conrad.

UltraDNS said it would begin to immediately resolve queries for all of Nominum's DNS hosting customers, including some 5,000 Secondary DNS customers.

"Nominum has always been an Internet leader and a fantastic competitor," said UltraDNS CEO Ben Petro. "We credit them for showing concern for their customers by selecting UltraDNS' carrier-class server network as the new service provider for their DNS hosting needs. Keeping the public network of DNS servers diversified reduces the possibility of a widespread BIND-related disaster of the public Internet. With the mass of major ccTLDs and gTLDs resolving through UltraDNS' fail-safe Directory Services Platform, the opportunity for dramatic Internet failure is significantly mitigated."

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