Cisco on Thursday said that it plans to acquire privately held network intelligence firm ThousandEyes, as the networking giant looks to boost network visibility and intelligence across its enterprise networking, cloud and application services portfolios.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Bloomberg reports the price tag to be nearly $1 billion, citing a person familiar with the matter.
Headquartered in San Francisco and founded in 2010, ThousandEyes provides an internet intelligence platform that delivers deep visibility and insights into application and services delivery over the Internet.
The company was started by Mohit Lad (CEO) and Ricardo Oliveira (CTO) with an initial grant of $150k from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
“ThousandEyes’ technology warns us when a user’s experience is less than ideal and can pinpoint where those failures were caused,” Todd Nightingale, senior vice president and general manager, Cisco Enterprise Networking and Cloud, explained in a blog post. “With thousands of agents deployed throughout the Internet, ThousandEyes’ platform has an unprecedented understanding of the Internet and grows more intelligent with every deployment.”
ThousandEyes will join Cisco’s newly-formed Networking Services business unit headed by Nightingale, and Lad will take on the role of GM of ThousandEyes, while Oliveira will focus on ThousandEyes product vision and strategy.
ThousandEyes will continue to be agnostic to underlying implementations so customers can benefit from it no matter what vendors they use, according to Lad.
The acquisition is expected to close before the end of Cisco’s Q1 FY’21.
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