Cisco has announced the acquisition of network intelligence firm ThousandEyes, a deal estimated to be worth up to nearly $1 billion, according to reports.
ThousandEyes is the latest in a string of cloud-based software acquisitions made by Cisco, following last month’s announcement that it intends to buy FluidMesh Networks, as well as last year’s purchases of Exablaze, CloudCherry, and Voicea.
ThousandEyes was founded in 2010 and was valued at $670 million in 2019. The 400-employee company provides performance analysis of local and wide area networks, launching a live Global Internet Outages Map at the start of the coronavirus lockdown in March. The map provides consumers, businesses, industry analysts and other parties with an insight into ongoing and recent internet outages that may be affecting the experiences of their customers or employees.
Although the financial terms of the deal have not been made public, the acquisition is said to be worth upwards of $1 billion, according to sources speaking to Bloomberg.
According to Cisco, “ThousandEyes’ platform has an unprecedented understanding of the Internet and grows more intelligent with ever (sic) deployment”.
“With ThousandEyes, AppDynamics and Cisco SD-WAN technology, we will have the ability to improve the performance, reliability and scalability of all the applications on which we depend so much," the company announced.
Todd Nightingale, senior VP and general manager of Cisco Enterprise Networking and Cloud, said that he is “excited to welcome the ThousandEyes team to Cisco”.
“The combination of Cisco and ThousandEyes will enable deeper and broader visibility to pin-point deficiencies and improve the network and application performance across all networks. This will give customers end-to-end visibility when accessing cloud applications, and Internet Intelligence will improve networking reliability and the overall application experience,” he said.
ThousandEyes will retain its existing brand as part of Cisco's newly-formed Networking Services business unit. ThousandEyes CEO and co-founder Mohit Lad is to take on the role of GM, while co-founder and CTO Ricardo Oliveira will “continue to drive ThousandEyes product vision and innovation strategy”.
The acquisition of ThousandEyes is likely to be part of Cisco’s plans to expand into the subscription software market.
