Sale of Zenedge: startup now under the wing of Oracle

Oracle, the US IT giant, has recently purchased the cyber security startup Zenedge, which had an office in Kaunas. The company is now planning further expansion of the business under the Oracle brand, Lithuanian business daily Verslo žinios reports.

With this acquisition, Oracle will now have two Lithuanian offices, its Oracle East Central Europe Limited branch office, which has been operating in Vilnius since 2002, and its new operation in Kaunas, which will be an engineering division, i.e. a center for programmers.

‘After the acquisition, Zenedge became part of the operations of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). We are planning significant growth in the region, so we may need to move to a bigger office, but the team remains the same, except that it now works for Oracle,’ stated Leon Kuperman, vice-president of the subdivision Oracle Dyn, which is responsible for software development.

A number of its new Kaunas recruits have come from the Barclays Centre in Vilnius, which has been a breeding ground for local IT talent. As Mr Kuperman explained to Verslo žinios:

“Barclays had and perhaps still has a significant security operations team. I don’t know the figures, but it could be several hundred people. We have managed to recruit a few of those who left Barclays. In addition, we have a multi-level training program called ‘from school to professional’’.

Mr Kuperman said that Oracle plans to expand its new Kaunas office, which currently employs about 30 people, to around 60 people by mid-2019, and that those specialists will also be able to work remotely from the office in Vilnius. Oracle’s goal is to build a team of around 120 IT professionals in Lithuania. This plan may, however, change depending on how quickly Oracle is able to fill its vacant positions, most of which are focused around cyber security and cloud computing.

It was Zenedge’s web-based security technologies that utilize artificial intelligence algorithms which initially drew the attention of Oracle, and the company then saw that Zenedge would be a perfect fit for the company’s cloud computing division Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) portfolio. A large amount of the work conducted by Zenedge will be further developed under the Oracle banner and made available to Oracle’s existing customer base. The Zenedge Cybersecurity Suite, for example, will now be sold as Oracle Dyn Web Application Security. This firewall application developed in Kaunas, one of the company’s flagship products, will also be joined by its DDoS attack mitigation solutions, which is now to be sold under the name Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

The headquarters of Zenedge are based in Los Angeles (USA), and the company has further units in Miami (USA), Singapore and the United Kingdom (UK). Its sales office for Europe is based in the UK, while its engineering division for testing and refining its products is based in Kaunas.

Laurent Gil, co-founder and product manager of Zenedge, told Verslo žinios that it was Lithuanian expertise in IT and other technical fields that prompted the company to establish and expand its engineering division in Lithuania. Moreover, close proximity and links to Kaunas University of Technology helped it secure access to a high concentration of potential employees.