Cisco continues its Acquisition Spree
One of the renowned IT companies, Cisco has recently announced the purchase of Thousand Eyes, a network intelligence company whose technology helps companies monitor their network for outages. The terms of the deal were not disclosed yet, however, a person familiar with the matter confirmed that the purchase price was about $1 billion. Cisco has been focusing on expanding its portfolio of cloud-based software so it can cater to companies that are moving away from their own data center and into more distributed environments.
The purchase follows Cisco’s 2017 acquisition of AppDynamics for $3.7 billion, which brought in software that brings companies spot bugs in their apps and instantly fix them. Additionally, Cisco’s prior software deals include the $2.35 billion purchase of Duo Security in 2018, and the $1.9 billion acquisition of Broadsoft in 2017, to add technology for contact centers.
Cisco’s first Completely Online Acquisition
This was the first acquisition Cisco had done completely online, which was the only real way to handle the transaction given the stay-at-home requirements in place since March. “It was tough to sign a deal like this without even walking into the same room to do technology diligence and business diligence,” said Todd Nightingale, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Enterprise Networking and Cloud at Cisco.
Mohit Lad, co-founder and CEO of ThousandEyes said they used the features of Cisco’s Webex video calling service to do the deal, including rooms where a few people can split off from the larger group and keep the conversation going. Like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and other calling technologies, Webex has become more widely used in recent months with people working from home to avoid the further spread of the coronavirus. “We were seeing so much pull from the market that we didn’t think we could cope with the demand, so that was one of the reason we accelerated this,” Lad added.
