Cisco has confirmed an agreement to buy closely watched network monitoring specialist ThousandEyes for an undisclosed sum. (Bloomberg, earlier reporting talks, had cited a figure of $1 billion).
ThousandEyes was launched in 2010 — with a $150,000 federal grant — by two UCLA doctoral students and has raised backing from investors including GV; the venture capital arm of Alphabet, Inc.
It closed its fiscal year passing $100 million in contract bookings.
Founder Mohit Lad dropped his PhD at the UCLA Lab to work on his plan for a Google Maps-like service to help companies monitor Internet traffic and dumpster dived for old servers to build early versions.
The company gathers data from the public Internet, data centers, co-location facilities and end-user devices to identify dependencies and spot outages. (We recently reported on its global internet outages map).
See also: New Global Internet Outages Map: “Concerning” Rise in ISP Outages
ThousandEyes will join Cisco’s newly-formed Networking Services business unit, whose head Todd Nightingale said the acquisition will enable “deeper and broader visibility to pin-point deficiencies and improve the network and application performance across all networks.”
He added in a blog: “Frequently, when acquiring important technologies like this, we try to find the right product analogy or comparison to an existing business or product. Consider this; is ThousandEyes the ultimate IP SLA for a multi-cloud, SD-WAN world? Yes. Does ThousandEyes give network-as-a-service offerings the visibility they need to respond proactively now that the Internet is our Enterprise network? Yes. However, I believe more than anything, ThousandEyes is to the network what Talos is to security.”
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Mohit Lad added: “In the last couple of years, we started to see two distinct themes in our customer conversations: ‘Can you collaborate with APM vendors such as AppDynamics and provide a true end-to-end view?’ [and] ‘can you make the unique intelligence you have on the Internet feedback to my network to make smarter decisions?’
“In our customer base, we kept running into AppDynamics on the application side and Cisco products on the network side and naturally started having conversations on collaborating with both sides of Cisco to formulate a strong joint vision. It was during these conversations over the last 12 months or so, that the two companies have gotten to know each other and developed a strong sense of mutual respect.”
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