With super-smart engineering graduates just about everywhere you look and plenty of behind-the-scenes companies putting their brains to use, New England’s technology sector is instrumental in keeping the digital world humming right along.
Just don’t tell that to everyone mesmerized by the hot new take on photo-sharing apps or anonymous messaging services. “The Internet’s run from the Northeast,” says Jeremy Hitchcock, CEO of Dyn. “People just haven’t figured that out yet.”
Today, Hitchcock’s company is consolidating more of those services with its acquisition of Renesys, a private Internet traffic monitoring company. Terms were not disclosed for the deal, which adds about 40 people to Dyn’s staff, giving it a new headcount of more than 350.
The Renesys deal is Dyn’s tenth acquisition in the past four years or so, and second this year. But this acquisition also stands out because, by adding the Renesys products, Dyn is adding a new line of business to its portfolio.
Manchester, NH-based Dyn (pronounced “dine”) has been around since the early 2000s and grew up alongside the Web itself. It’s most known for Domain Name System services, which connect familiar Web addresses like twitter.com to the numeric Internet Protocol addresses that servers and routers use to deliver content. Dyn also added e-mail delivery services, helping to keep digital traffic flowing into inboxes around the world.
Along the way, Dyn picked up some very notable names as customers, including Twitter, Tumblr, Netflix, Pandora, Zappos, and Box. After a decade of bootstrapping itself to profitability and multimillion-dollar revenues, Dyn took on its first round of venture capital in 2012 with a $38 million investment from North Bridge Venture Partners. That same year, according to its entry with Inc. magazine, Dyn had more than $30 million in revenue.
Dyn has continued to grow since then, while still holding strong to its New Hampshire roots. That’s partly how Hitchcock and company ran across Renesys, which is also based in Manchester.
The smaller company has more than a decade of experience monitoring the flow of Internet traffic around the world, and has become expert at detecting and interpreting disruptions and slowdowns in that traffic flow—Cambridge, MA-based Akamai often cites the firm in its State of the Internet reports.
“We’ve known each other for a number of years, so the timing for both them and for us really worked out well,” Hitchcock says. “We look at them and see being able to have a real insight into how the Internet performs on a real-time basis, and that’s something our customers are asking for.”
Hitchcock says the addition of Renesys can both serve Dyn’s more traditional client base and bring some new kinds of customers into the fold. As a standalone company, for example, Renesys has sold network-monitoring services to IT professionals, sales teams, and government and security clients.
And as for keeping up the Northeast’s prominence in the Internet’s plumbing, Dyn plans to hold onto Renesys’ previous office in Hanover, NH—after all, it’s right next to Dartmouth.
“We’re looking forward to another hub of talent we can access,” Hitchcock says.
