On Monday, Juniper Networks announced that it has acquired Altor Networks for about $95 million in cash.

Altor sells monitoring and security tools for virtualized environments. According to Juniper, "Altor's solution enables security visibility, compliance and control over the entire virtual machine infrastructure, giving security teams visibility to understand the applications, services and traffic being sent between virtual machines."

Specifically, Altor will bring to Juniper's product line a hypervisor-based firewall, intrusion-detection capabilities, network visibility and monitoring tools, as well as reporting tools designed for meeting compliance requirements.

"Over the last year we have heard a consistent concern from our data center security customers around securing the traffic that runs between the [virtual machines] on their increasingly virtualized servers," said Douglas Murray, general manager for high-end security and data center services at Juniper Networks, in a blog post.

"To address this need, Juniper and Altor Networks were working together as partners to bring a joint solution to market," he said. "As we progressed with the partnership, we saw a unique opportunity to deliver technology that would differentiate us in the market, expand our leadership in the data center and align with our overall corporate strategy."

Interestingly, early in 2010, Juniper had invested in Altor through its Junos Innovation Fund venture capital fund.

Murray said that near-term results from the acquisition of Altor would include tying "Altor technology with our SRX Series Services Gateways and Junos Space automation platform," which would make Juniper Networks "the only vendor in the market with an integrated solution to provide security at scale for both the physical and virtual world."

Accordingly, he said, customers could "deploy a consistent set of security policies and services including firewalling, intrusion detection and network visibility throughout their entire infrastructure."

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