Vendor lineage
Infoblox - DDI, and why it is one product
DNS, DHCP and address management are three protocols and one source of truth.
Infoblox builds DDI - the industry's contraction for DNS, DHCP and IP address management sold as one system. The contraction exists because the three cannot honestly be operated apart: an address is allocated by DHCP, recorded in address management, and made findable by DNS, and any of them disagreeing with the others produces a fault that appears somewhere else entirely.
Infoblox was founded in Chicago in 1999 by Stuart Bailey with Michael Ford, Greg Lanier, Tom Kowal and Ivan Pulleyn, and it effectively created the market now called DDI - DNS, DHCP and address management sold as one managed system rather than as three sets of configuration files on machines somebody set up years earlier.
The proposition was reliability before it was security. SilverBox, in 2005, was an early nonstop appliance for DNS and DHCP, and the pitch was that services this fundamental should not depend on a particular server, a particular administrator or a particular text file. Anyone who has traced an outage back to a zone file edited by hand understands the argument without needing it explained.
Its ownership follows the standard path: public on the New York Stock Exchange from 2012, taken private by Vista Equity Partners in 2016, later with Warburg Pincus alongside. The company that made core network services into a product is now itself a private equity holding, which is what happens to a business whose revenue is predictable and whose category is mature.
The security framing came later and it followed the data rather than the marketing. A system that answers every name query in an organisation holds the most complete record of what that organisation's machines are trying to reach, which makes it a detection surface as much as an operational one - and the reason DDI vendors and resolver vendors ended up in the same market from opposite directions.