Cisco is buying ThousandEyes in the hopes of improving its own network resiliency.
The price of the acquisition was not disclosed, but Bloomberg places the figure at around $1bn.
Cisco’s acquisition will broaden the company's visibility to pinpoint deficiencies and improve its network and application performance. ThousandEyes will continue to be vendor-neutral, and offer the same services it does today,
Cisco wants resilience
“We need to have better visibility, intelligence and insights of the Internet than we ever had from private networks," Cisco SVP and GM Todd Nightingale said.
“Headquartered in San Francisco and founded in 2010, ThousandEyes provides Internet intelligence at a scale and accuracy never seen before. In a time when every meeting is held and every document is shared through connected applications, the need for ThousandEyes technology has never been so high.
“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.”
ThousandEyes's big day
In a blog post, ThousandEyes CEO and co-founder, Mohit Lad said: “Today is a big day as we announce our plans to join forces with Cisco.
“I have been asked about our exit strategy many times. I have never liked that question. We’ve never had an exit strategy and I used to say my exit strategy is 'to not have one.' Even an IPO is not an exit to me - it’s just a new phase for the company. So, our strategy has been to keep growing and to make decisions that were healthy for the long term. While some folks may argue that this is an exit, it’s not in my mind.
“We decided to become part of Cisco because we saw the potential to do much more, much faster, and truly create a legacy for ThousandEyes."
ThousandEyes was born in 2013 as a startup between Lad and co-founder Ricardo Oliveira and focused on complex Internet routing issues and troubleshooting networks.
Over the years, the company has monitored various outages and network failures such as Facebook, Google issues, or smaller blackouts like the one which brought down WhatsApp in the UK last year.
