Dyn, a company that helps route Internet traffic faster for companies such as Twitter and CNBC, will acquire Renesys, which studies hiccups and inefficiencies in global data traffic, the companies said Monday.
The terms of the deal were not disclosed. Dyn, based in Manchester, New Hampshire, said Renesys' global monitoring of the Internet will give it insight into the performance and connectivity capabilities of service providers, which is crucial data needed to make applications perform faster.
One of Dyn's main specialties is optimizing DNS (Domain Name System) requests for large service providers, a hardly exciting but crucial part of how the Internet works.
DNS servers translate a domain name, such as idg.com, into an IP address which can be called into a browser. Large service providers that run data centers around the world want to make sure that DNS queries direct their users to the nearest one to ensure the content arrives as fast as possible.
Ensuring the most efficient routing based on changing network conditions is something Renesys has studied for a long time. Doug Madory, Renesys' senior analyst, said companies will ask Renesys which service providers would be best to use for a data center located in, for example, Singapore.
Renesys can look back on data it has collected for the previous six months and see how connections were routed from different providers. Madory said in a phone interview it's often opaque even to ISPs how Internet "traffic flows over time and understanding if it is taking a long time, why is it so."
Renesys is often one of the first companies to produce analysis on the effects of problems with submarine data cables and how traffic flows when governments such as in Egypt or Syria try to block internet access.
Dyn said Renesys' performance and geographic intelligence will be incorporated into its traffic management and messaging management platforms. Dyn also specializes in ensuring so-called "transactional email," which are automated emails generated by some action a user has taken on a website, are delivered and not wrongly blocked by security software.
Renesys' 40 employees are based in Hanover, New Hampshire.
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