Oracle Acquires Dyn - A Supereme DNS Provider in $600+ Million

Business software vendor Oracle announced on Monday that it is buying cloud-based Internet performance and Domain Name System (DNS) provider Dyn.

Dyn is the same company that was hit by a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack by the Mirai botnet last month which knocked the entire Internet offline for a few hours, crippling some of the world's biggest and most popular websites.

Since the company provides cloud-based DNS service to customers such as Spotify, Netflix, Twitter and Pfizer, the acquisition will help Oracle's cloud customers to optimize their infrastructure costs and performance.

According to the press release, the Dyn acquisition "extends the Oracle cloud computing platform and provides enterprise customers with a one-stop shop for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)."

"Oracle Cloud customers will have unique access to Internet performance information that will help them optimize infrastructure costs, maximize application and website-driven revenue, and manage risk," said Kyle York, chief strategy officer of Dyn.

The company said Dyn's immensely scalable and global DNS is not just a critical core component but also provides a natural extension to Oracle's cloud computing platform.

So, the deal would help its cloud customers improve access and page-load speeds for their websites using internet performance information.

Oracle did not disclose the acquisition amount it paid for Dyn, but a source close to the deal told Fortune that Oracle paid somewhere between $600 Million and $700 Million to acquire Dyn.

Dan Primack reported that Oracle paid around $600 million for Dyn, though Dyn has yet to respond to a request for comment.

Oracle is far behind Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is the market leader in the infrastructure cloud computing market. The deal would potentially make the company compete with Amazon's AWS and on Microsoft's Azure – Route 53 and Azure DNS.

LinkedIn Introduces New Dedicated Service for Hiring Freelancers

Platforms for connecting freelancers with clients are not all that uncommon nowadays with Elance, Freelancer, Fiverr and many more. LinkedIn, the business-oriented social networking site, was behind in this aspect.

Now it looks like they’ve also decided to get in on the freelancing action.

LinkedIn has created a new freelance marketplace called ProFinder. The new marketplace is designed to help freelance professionals find clients both big and small that need their services.

With the new service, all you would have to do is fill out a brief description of the type of work you want done and you are matched with qualified professionals who are a best fit for your project.

How Does LinkedIn ProFinder Work?

In order to hire a freelancer, you will have to search for the service that you need. Currently there are over 140 areas of expertise listed at Linkedin that you can choose from.

After that, you will be required to fill in the form, detailing your specific needs, your location , the time frame, budget and job requirements.

LinkedIn says that within a few hours, you can receive up to 5 proposals from freelancers based on your request and LinkedIn profile.

You will then be contacted by the freelancers with a message, a price quote and also a link to their LinkedIn profiles.

What Makes ProFinder Different than Others?

Vaibhav Goel, the Product Lead for LinkedIn ProFinder, said in an interview that the ProFinder features deep integration with the LinkedIn network, something that makes it attractive when compared with other online freelancer services.

Quality of freelancers is also an issue. ProFinder takes care of this by letting you view the profile of the freelancers, including their work history, references and their connections. People can verify how genuine freelancers are from sources they can trust. This is a big factor in deciding who to hire and it certainly helps.

ProFinder is certainly great tool from a freelancer’s perspective. It’s an improved experience because instead of spending valuable time looking for services, you can hear directly from potential clients.

Some Concerns

But not everything is in favor for the freelancers, there are a couple of disadvantages to this too. One of those is that if the client’s projects on ProFinder don’t come as detailed project outlines. This means that there’s no way to find out the actual amount of work that is needed to be done.

With this problem, the freelancer has no way of setting an appropriate asking price for his/her project. There is also no way to ask questions from the client in regards to this matter either before applying for the project. You can only discuss the matter in detail once the client has accepted you and already confirmed a price.

Secondly, freelancers only have about 5 minutes to set up a proposal and have it sent to the client. So you have to act quickly or face getting locked out from presenting a proposal.

LinkedIn has to make a ton of improvements before ProFinder can become the de-facto leader for freelancers. However, it is good to see the world’s most well-known professional social network getting into the freelancing game. Hopefully, it will listen to concerns of all stakeholders if it wants to make ProFinder useful for the freelancing community.