Cisco is dedicated to innovation as the path to growth as well as the key to sustaining our market leadership position. Our build, buy, partner strategy has always been driven by customer need and on capturing market transitions.

Today, we are excited to announce an important acquisition that addresses the rapidly occurring shift to cloud networking as a key part of Cisco’s overall strategy. San Francisco-based Meraki, a leader in cloud networking, offers customers on-premise networking solutions that are centrally managed from the cloud.

When compared to other opportunities, Meraki built a unique cloud-based business from the ground up that addresses the broader networking shift towards cloud, not just within wireless. Meraki created a massively scalable architecture that offers easy to deploy, secure, and manage networks. They didn’t obsess about the number of features, but instead focused on those that could be simplified or removed entirely.  Customers liked what they saw, and today they are supporting 20,000 customers and hundreds of thousands of network devices on their cloud platform. This has resulted in a business that is growing exponentially with great margins.

Talent is one of the most important components of every Cisco acquisition. Meraki’s co-founders, Sanjit, John and Hans, are true visionaries and leaders. The founders began with the technology, and then experimented with different markets -- pivoting from a research project at MIT to a municipal Wi-Fi company to a leading cloud networking company focused on the midmarket. Along the way, they recruited experts and created a culture in San Francisco that attracted great talent. They have focused this team around a business model that combines a rapid development methodology tightly linked to a go to market engine.

During the course of our interactions, we quickly realized that Cisco and Meraki’s shared a vision of accelerating the adoption of cloud within networking as a means to simplify operations and enable new network applications. Sequoia Capital, an early investor in Cisco, also recognized the strength of the people at Meraki, and it’s great to see the technology ecosystem come full circle.

The Meraki acquisition is another example of Cisco’s focus on accelerating our adoption of software based business models. In fact, Cisco’s last seven acquisitions (Cloupia, vCider, ThinkSmart, Virtuata, Truviso, ClearAccess and NDS) have all been software companies. Cisco’s strategy is to take Meraki’s cloud platform and business model and scale this within Cisco as our new Cloud Networking Group, led by Sanjit, John, and Hans.

I am delighted to welcome the Meraki team to the Cisco family, and look forward to a prosperous and industry-transforming future together.

Tags: acquisition, cloud networking, meraki

Cisco is pleased to announce that it has acquired privately-held vCider. Based in Mountain View, California, vCider has expertise in the development of virtual network overlay technology for secure data center infrastructure. vCider will be integrated into Cisco’s Cloud Computing organization, reporting to Lew Tucker, chief technology officer, Cloud Computing, and will play an important role in the Cisco Open Network Environment (ONE) strategy, particularly in support of OpenStack.

OpenStack is a key pillar of Cisco’s open, multi-hypervisor, multi-stack Cloud computing strategy. Cisco joined OpenStack 18 months ago and has been a significant contributor to the OpenStack Quantum API track ever since.

With Quantum becoming a core OpenStack service, it’s clear that programmable networking is quickly becoming an important component in large scale, multi-tenant, cloud computing environments. Cisco’s Quantum plug-in is designed to give application developers increased programmability of both virtual and physical networks linking the world of cloud computing to the advanced capabilities of Cisco’s Open Networking Environment (ONE).

So where does vCider come in? The vCider team has created a multi-tenant distributed virtual network controller. vCider’s code and technology will be integrated into our current development efforts of the OpenStack Quantum network service.

Mergers and acquisitions along with investments remain a key part of Cisco’s build, buy, and partner innovation framework and supports our strategy of providing best-in-class solutions for our customers. The vCider acquisition is well-aligned to our strategic goals to develop innovative virtualization/cloud technologies, while also cultivating top talent.

Tags: acquisition, Cloud Computing, lew tucker, M&A, OpenStack

The widespread proliferation of mobile devices and services provides opportunities for enterprises and service providers to better serve their end users based on location and preferences inside venues and retail spaces. With Cisco’s acquisition of ThinkSmart’s network and Wi-Fi location analytics capabilities announced today, the customer experience in public venues such as retail locations, hotels and airports, is about to get much better.

ThinkSmart Technologies, based in Cork, Ireland, is a software company that delivers location data analysis using Wi-Fi technology. Together, Cisco and ThinkSmart will enhance the wireless network by providing location intelligence and analytics to service provider and enterprise customers to know what is happening in their environments and to better engage end users.

ThinkSmart’s location analytics collects information on movement within a venue including time of day, traffic patterns and dwell times. This information helps enterprises and venue operators improve the customer experience by identifying appropriate staffing levels, reducing wait times, optimizing business processes, and improving customer flows.

Cisco’s vision for mobility solutions will be accelerated by the acquisition of ThinkSmart enabling customers to analyze location data from wireless networks and provide insight that can be used to drive new commercial opportunities and enhance end-user experiences.

ThinkSmart, initially formed at the Incubation Centre of University College Cork, joins Cisco’s Wireless Networking Group. The acquisition closed in the first quarter of Cisco’s fiscal year 2013.

The acquisition of ThinkSmart reinforces Cisco’s commitment to deliver an intelligent network by providing customers with enhanced tools, such as location analytics, that increase the value of the network. This aligns with the core; one of Cisco’s five foundational priorities, by providing differentiated solutions within the infrastructure of the network.

Tags: acquisition, Thinksmart, wi-fi

Cisco today announced it has completed the acquisition of NDS Group Ltd., a leading provider of video software and content security solutions that enable service providers and media companies to securely deliver and monetize new video experiences. NDS, which has approximately 5,000 employees, will become part of Cisco’s Service Provider Video Technology Group (SPVTG), led by Senior Vice President and General Manager Jesper Andersen.

While much has been written about this acquisition since it was announced, there’s plenty of exciting news yet to come. Over the next several months, we will begin to discuss with the industry analyst community the full impact of what it means to put together two market leaders. By combining the strengths of both companies, we have a unique opportunity to serve stakeholder across the video entertainment industry. Stay tuned for more information.

To read the full release, click here. To read Jesper Andersen’s take on the transaction, click here.

Tags: acquisition, security, video, videoscape

Cisco is pleased to announce that it has acquired privately held Virtuata. Based in Milpitas, Calif., Virtuata provides innovative capabilities for securing virtual machine level information in data centers and cloud environments. Together, Cisco and Virtuata will enable consistent and enhanced security for virtual machines allowing customers to accelerate the deployment of multi-tenant, multi-hypervisor cloud infrastructures.

Cloud and virtualization are significant disrupters in the market. When customers move to these environments, security concerns arise where infrastructure is shared across multiple applications, business units or even organizations. As more and more business applications move to virtualized platforms, security and isolation become necessary conditions at the virtual machine level. This acquisition is highly complementary to Cisco’s vision of a unified data center that securely connects people and businesses with applications and data through virtual and cloud environments.

The Virtuata acquisition reinforces Cisco’s build, buy, partner innovation framework and supports our strategy of providing best-in-class solutions for our customers. It is well-aligned to our strategic goals to develop innovative virtualization, cloud and security technologies, while also cultivating top talent. The Virtuata team will join Cisco’s Data Center Group led by David Yen, senior vice president, Data Center Group.

As we continue to use all of Cisco’s assets to drive innovation, acquisitions such as Virtuata will help bring additional top talent, new technology, and unique business models into Cisco. The Virtuata acquisition reinforces Cisco’s commitment to deliver an intelligent network by providing market leading infrastructure across the data center.

Tags: acquisition, M&A, virtuata