Over the last 3 years, Cisco has been making acquisitions at a phenomenal rate. The influx of new and exciting tech companies joining forces with IT big-fish, Cisco, has kept them at the front and centre of innovation. In this article, we will briefly cover the last 20 Cisco acquisitions that were made and explain the result of the merger.
When Cisco acquired Lancope, they were most interested in Lancope’s Stealthwatch security appliance. Stealthwatch is now one of Cisco’s leading cyber-security solutions and is highly regarded in the industry for its advanced capability for detecting malware hidden within encrypted traffic. In essence, Cisco Stealthwatch drastically enhances threat defence by giving detailed network visibility and security analytics. It helps you know every host, record every conversation, understand what is normal, it alerts you to change and enables you to respond to threats quickly.
1 Mainstream Inc. possessed a cloud-based video platform designed to quickly launch live and on-demand OTT video services to a large number of different types of devices. By acquiring 1Mainstream, Cisco attempted to invest further in Cisco’s Infinite cloud video entertainment solutions. 1 Mainstreams knowledge in cloud video helped Cisco keep up with the pace of change in the streaming video market. 1 Mainstream was renamed Infinite Video by Cisco.
Acano Limited were providers of collaboration infrastructure and conferencing software before they merged with Cisco. Their offering included gateways and video and audio bridging technology that connects customers’ video systems across cloud and hybrid environments. Acano’s technology was integrated into Cisco’s Meeting Server and helped them deliver the high-quality video across every endpoint, every workspace, and to every user.
Jasper Technologies became Cisco Jasper after their acquisition. As the industry-leading IoT service platform, with many of the world’s largest enterprises and service providers using the Jasper platform, Cisco decided that they needed to use Jaspers technology to further their own IoT service offerings. Because of this, organisations around the world use Cisco to scale their IoT services business globally. Cisco Jasper allows companies to connect any device over the cellular networks of the top service providers and manage these devices of through Cisco’s Saas platform.
CliQr provided application-centric hybrid cloud management software before there acquisition by Cisco. Their technology allowed users to create a single app profile that could be deployed across multiple environments, data centres, servers, and clouds. Cisco made the purchase of CliQr as their management software was extremely efficient at optimising app performance and ensuring consistency in policies across locations. CliQr was renamed Cisco CloudCenter.
The spree of Cisco acquisitions continued. Just one day after the CliQr deal, Cisco bought Leaba Semiconductor, a team in Israel who possessed a good reputation for designing leading-edge networking semiconductors that avoid infrastructure challenges through intelligent innovation. Cisco made this decision to likely attempt to bolster its hardware portfolio with highly advanced chip technology.
Synata was a search start-up that allowed users to search through data that was in the cloud or on-premise simultaneously. Their goal was to integrate Synata’s technology into Spark, it instant messaging client. Spark is now named WebEx Teams.
Cisco acquired cloud security company CloudLock Inc. in 2016 for $293 million. Like Synata, CloudLock also has strong links in Israel. Cloudlock specialises in cloud access security broker technology (CASB) that provides enterprises with analytics and visibility into user behaviour and important data in cloud services. This acquisition was made in order to further enhance Cisco’s security portfolio and develop their Security Everywhere strategy which aims to provide complete protection, the entire way from the cloud to the endpoint.
ContainerX was a relatively new firm when they were bought by Cisco. As the name suggests ContainerX were a container management specialist. Cisco targeted ContainerX because they had a technology that would enable enterprise-class container management over various different platforms. The ContainerX team joined Cisco’s Cloud Platform and Services Group.
At the start of 2017, Cisco made the widely reported acquisition of AppDynamics, an advanced cloud application and business monitoring platform, for a huge $3.7 billion. AppDynamics is a great tool that lets customers monitor the performance of business applications, helping them achieve greater visibility into the inner workings and chokepoints of their applications. This enables much faster problem resolution and helps you spot and diffuse potentially damaging situations. AppDynamics is one of the most exciting platforms in Cisco’s portfolio.
Viptela was founded in 2012, five years before going into business with Cisco. They made a name for themselves through their SD-WAN solution. Viptela made deploying wide area networks much simpler to deploy and more efficient to manage. This process was always associated with complexity and time. This is another purchase Cisco made to further their cloud-based networking portfolio.
In this venture, Cisco purchased only a segment of the firm, Sagezza. The Advanced Analytics team consisted of a select group of platform analytics experts with special capabilities in cloud and secure platform development. The innovative technology, that this team has been responsible for, enables customers to rapidly gain and analyse data, forming complex rules and new methods of visualising data.
MindMeld is a pioneer in the AI industry. Their platform enables their customers to build intelligent and human-like conversational interfaces for any application or device. This acquisition was made to introduce AI voice assistants into Cisco’s collaboration portfolio, specifically in WebEx Teams and the WebEx Board.
Observable networks are a forensic security cloud service provider based in the US. They delivered their forensic tools as a service via the cloud. Their technology is based on behavioural modelling of devices on a network in order to seek out anomalies and external threats. The acquisition was made by Cisco in order to enhance their Stealthwatch security platform.
Springpath developed a distributed file system built for hyperconvergence that enabled server-based storage systems. Cisco made this purchase to expand their next-generation data centre portfolio. Springpath technology was eventually integrated with Cisco’s Hyperflex platform.
Perspica were a machine learning-driven operations analytics business. They were acquired by Cisco with the sole intention to put their technology into the AppDynamics platform. With this addition, customers are able to leverage machine learning capabilities to analyse great amounts of application related data.
Broadsoft is one of the big names in cloud calling and contact centre solutions. They found success in a market where customers are increasingly requiring voice solutions that can be deployed either in the cloud or on-prem. Cisco purchased Broadsoft for $1.9 billion to develop a new method to sell their collaboration tools as their focus change from selling boxes and hardware, to selling subscription based software.
Cmpute.io is a software-as-a-service platform that saves users money by helping them discover when it makes sense to place workloads in Amazon Web Services spot instances (AWS). This can supposedly save over 80 percent of cloud costs. Cisco is infusing this technology into their CloudCenter platform to give their customers the ability to optimise their cloud consumption to minimise costs.
Cisco’s first acquisition of this year was Skyport Systems, a provider of cloud managed, hyper-converged systems that operate and protect business-critical applications. The idea of this deal is to take advantage of Skyport’s IP to bolster its hybrid cloud positioning and simplify the process of securing and managing hybrid cloud environments for their customers.
The most recent in the list of Cisco acquisitions was of AI-driven relationship intelligence platform, Accompany. The platform they provided before the acquisition allowed users to submit a professional they wished to know more about and receive a wealth of information about them that Accompany’s AI had discovered while trawling the internet. This technology is going to be used by Cisco in order to accelerate priority areas across its collaboration portfolio. When Accompany is integrated with WebEx, users will be provided with details about the person and company they are speaking to. Some people have also speculated that Cisco could be developing a professional social platform to rival LinkedIn, but this has not been confirmed in any way.
We hope you liked this article. If you would like to know more about some of the Cisco ventures named in this list, such as Accompany, Cliqr, WebEx Teams, or the WebEx Board, we have some interesting articles regarding them.
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