Cisco has announced plans to buy out private-equity-backed network monitoring and assurance company Accedian, which has been partnering with the IT and networking giant on assurance for telco networks.
Financial terms of the agreement have not been disclosed, and the transaction is expected to close by the end of October, during Cisco’s fiscal first quarter.
Accedian was acquired by Bridge Growth Partners in 2017; Bridge Growth said that during the time it has owned the company, Accedian went through “significant business transformation,” including expansion into cybersecurity, folding Paris-based Performance Vision into the company and the establishment of a “SaaS-first platform” for Accedian’s granular network and application monitoring and analytics.
Dion Joannou, CEO of Accedian, said that the acquisition announcement is “a testament to our position on the leading edge of SaaS-based service assurance capabilities. … We are well positioned to bring significant strategic value to our global customers as part of Cisco.”
“Microseconds matter to customers and customer experience, and precise, granular performance visibility is a foundational requirement for closed-loop automation, agile telco cloud environments, and latency-sensitive 5G services,” Joannou said, as relayed in a Cisco blog post on the acquisition. “We look forward to bringing our critical capabilities to a wider set of solutions within Cisco’s Networking portfolio and taking the next step in the partnership we have built with Cisco and our joint customers over the last years.”
Cisco’s Kevin Wollenweber, who is SVP and GM of Cisco Networking’s data center and service provider organization, wrote that CSPs “and webscalers in particular are experiencing increasing subscriber expectations and stringent performance requirements that require real-time data and actionable insights to ensure their networks perform as expected.”
“Organizations must be able to more easily assure digital experiences over every network that matters to them, which is why network and service assurance is a strategic part of the Cisco Networking Cloud,” Wollenweber wrote. The Accedian acquisition is meant to help Cisco address those customer challenges, and the company will join Wollenweber’s organization within Cisco Networking.
Cisco and Accedian were already working together via a Cisco partner program and offering a joint automation and assurance solution for service providers. Wollenweber wrote that “Accedian greatly strengthens Cisco’s approach to assurance” and will “accelerate Cisco’s vision of bringing high-performance assurance to Service Providers,” as well as provide the opportunity to link Accedian’s network performance and user experience data into Cisco’s ThousandEyes’ cloud for end-to-end network assurance.
This story has been updated to reflect the proper name of Bridge Growth Partners.
