back to article Cisco gobbles OpenDNS, sorts out cloud security portfolio

Cisco will buy privately held net security firm OpenDNS for $635m in cash, to make good its cloud security portfolio and boost the networking giant's "security everywhere" approach. Announcing the deal today, the leviathan is offering the bundle of cash alongside assumed equity awards, plus retention based incentives for …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What a disaster. I expect they'll accept coin from companies to be removed from the adware blacklist.

    1. MacroRodent

      IntimateDNS

      I use OpenDNS at home (to filter pr0n from the kid - at least until he wises up and learns about DNS and how to change the name server setting :-), and have enabled the statistics. It is eye-opening how much one can deduce about browsing habits from even rough statistics about the DNS lookups (and also the staggering amount of tracking and advertisement lookups). Something that could be pure gold for advertisers, and also various spooks or other shady characters. I'm keeping an eye on whether OpenDNS keeps its integrity. Any alternatives if it goes sour?

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Any alternatives if it goes sour?

        Not an outfit one would choose to associate with security but Norton offer something similar.

        A list including some of the better options:

        http://pcsupport.about.com/od/tipstricks/a/free-public-dns-servers.htm

      3. This post has been deleted by its author

  2. Tom from the States

    What could possibly go wrong?

    Nothing could go wrong here.

    -Signed,

    The previous owners of Flip Video and Linksys

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: What could possibly go wrong?

      To be fair to Cisco, those companies were consumer oriented and Cisco should never have tried to enter that market.

      1. Gene Cash Silver badge

        Re: What could possibly go wrong?

        > To be fair to Cisco, those companies were consumer oriented and Cisco should never have tried to enter that market.

        That's absolute crap. Cisco had a golden opportunity to throw its much vaunted network engineering expertise in, and make Linksys a decent brand. Savvy folk would have discovered it was the go-to brand and it would have trickled down to all the people the savvy folk help - "buy Linksys, it's got a nice UI and no few security holes"

        Instead the opposite happened and it's still "don't buy that crap" after all this time.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: What could possibly go wrong?

          > Savvy folk would have discovered it was the go-to brand

          I know you're referring to Linksys but savvy folk don't buy Cisco if they can buy/use/install something else (typically more capable at a lower price). Adding Cisco to an existing brand is very unlikely to improve it.

          Cisco is to networking what Microsoft is to software.

      2. Dan 55 Silver badge

        Re: What could possibly go wrong?

        OpenDNS is consumer orientated too. Farewell OpenDNS, it was nice knowing you.

        1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

          Re: What could possibly go wrong?

          Farewell OpenDNS, it was nice knowing you.

          Personally, I dumped them years ago when it became too difficult to turn off their fucking wildcarding.

          I use TCP/IP for real work, not just farting around on the web. I need DNS to return correct results, not redirections to some stupid OpenDNS web server.

          For a while it was possible to disable that bad behavior, if you were running Windows, and their little tray program worked, except when the ISP connection dropped and came back up with a new address from DHCP, which happens pretty much daily with my ISP. Then even that stopped working even marginally reliably.

          1. Dan 55 Silver badge

            Re: What could possibly go wrong?

            Well I just pointed my router's DNS at their servers and when they announced that they'd pulled the search page their DNS went back to working to spec. Even before that, their DNS was better than my ISP's.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: What could possibly go wrong?

        Last time I looked, OpenDNS is consumer targeted although I could be wrong.

    2. theblackhand

      Re: What could possibly go wrong?

      While these things are always open to interpretation/different points of view:

      - IMHO smart phones and HD video killed the FlipVideo market. I suspect FlipVideo was a disaster for Cisco as there was little of real value in the IP

      - while Linksys may have provided a useful change of direction for Cisco by increasing the use of open source software, Linksys and their open source violations meant there was a lot of pain involved. Couple that with a consumer market that was in a race to the bottom for home network gear and I suspect this was another expensive mistake as the likely target was improving set top boxes which hasn't been one of Cisco's star performers in recent years.

      So the previous owners of FlipVideo/Linksys are probably happy - the employees that didn't get a share of the acquisition pie would be less so.

  3. CAPS LOCK

    On behalf of OpenDNS users...

    ..."Bummer".

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: On behalf of OpenDNS users...

      There goes another useful independent service, assimilated into a hateful corporate monolith, which will inevitably destroy the usefulness while making the service an expensive paid-for model with crap support.

      1. TheTick

        Re: On behalf of OpenDNS users...

        "hateful corporate monolith" - really?

        Any evidence for this hatred? And hatred to whom?

        Or is it you that hates it? If so for what reason?

        Sigh.

  4. Mage Silver badge

    Nothing that Cisco can't do

    So obviously this purchase is to ensure a competitor doesn't buy it and that they are not competition.

  5. JP19

    "of nearly 50 billion devices by 2020"

    People are still sprouting that 50 billion bollocks?

    7 devices for each soul on the planet.

    This tech savvy and wealthy western household has 6 devices between 2 of us and they have all been connected for years.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "of nearly 50 billion devices by 2020"

      By 2020, though, you will have a further 8 internet-connected fridges....

      1. psychonaut

        Re: "of nearly 50 billion devices by 2020"

        Each of which will talk to your smart light bulb mesh, then to the smartmeter. It may even go via the smart eggs your missus is, uh, wearing

        1. Preston Munchensonton
          Coat

          Re: "of nearly 50 billion devices by 2020"

          It may even go via the smart eggs your missus is, uh, wearing

          Maybe your missus wears smart eggs. All the ladies I've "known" wear something entirely different.

    2. James O'Shea

      Re: "of nearly 50 billion devices by 2020"

      Hmm... I'm at home at the moment, and just in this room I, personally, have...

      2 cell phones

      2 desktop computers

      1 laptop

      1 printer

      1 tablet.

      I'm not counting the server ('cause it ain't in this room and it's only barely connected, in that it's on a network which has a connection) nor am I counting the tv (the set top box for it, that is) or the blu-ray player as they're not in this room, either. Nor am I counting the other tvs/set-top boxes, blu-rays, computers, cell phones, or tablets elsewhere in the house. And not the VOIP phones. And I'm pretty sure that there's something I'm forgetting.

  6. Eduard Coli

    Great big sellout

    I'm sure Cisco has only the comfort of their masters on their collective minds. It would certainly help the CPC if Cisco would block a service that might allow the Chinese people access to something besides state propaganda.

  7. cyrus
    FAIL

    Well

    that f-ing sucks. Hate it when a hugely useful service is bought by doubious interests. Not too sure how I will replace that. Guess I will need to find a solution sooner rather than later. Fare thee well OpenDNS.

  8. SecretSonOfHG

    As an OpenDNS paying user

    I have to say I'm very happy with the service. It has been very useful to protect the kid's Windows machines from assorted internet threats (I'm still astonished each time I look at their blocking stats) It performs very well and has an uptime of 100%, at least from my experience. Changing DNS settings is the about the first thing I do when I begin to configure a new networked device in the house.

    Thanks to their excellent support I also discovered that my Vodafone provided home router was silently intercepting DNS traffic and using their own caching and DNS servers, something that to this day Vodafone's telephone technical support can't even begin to understand what it means. I had to hack their router to disable that for OpenDNS to work, but the OpenDNS staff was very patient and knowledgeable about my issues even if they were not even remotely their fault.

    Hoping that the Cisco buyout does not cancel their home plan (don't remember how much it is, but is about $10-$15 a year which is quite reasonable for protecting all your home machines) and that their service keeps performing.

  9. Dieter Haussmann

    Cisco's acquisition of Meraki cloud-managed networks has been a boon.

    OpenDNS is free to consumers and paid-for for enterprise.

    As long as that stays the case and they improve the weak enterprise offering and integrate it into their other cloud-managed products, I'm all for it.

  10. Tom -1

    Sad news

    Unless Cisco has changed dramatically since I was stuck with working with their products, this simply means that OpenDNS will deteriorate, becoming bug-ridden and insecure. But I'm very out of date on Cisco, as the only Cisco products I have any experience of (apart from firewalls) have been products shipped more than 13 years ago, because twelve and a half years ago I started suggesting putting non-Cicso switches in customer proposals and a decade or more ago I recommended to my employer that no Cisco switch or BBSM should ever again be included in any proposal to any customer and the suggestion was welcomed with open arms as Cisco products were definitely causing problems.

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