Today, businesses are looking at security in a strategic, comprehensive way to protect mission critical processes and assets. There has never been a greater need to understand the impact that security threats can have on a company’s bottom line. For these reasons, experienced security advice is now among the table stakes required to assess and address the threat landscape that faces enterprises today. The skills and capabilities companies need to maintain a strong security posture, keep pace with rapidly evolving threats and take full advantage of new technologies that can protect their businesses are rare and difficult to retain.

The right advisory service can change all of that.

I am pleased to announce Cisco’s intent to acquire privately held Neohapsis, a Chicago-based security advisory company providing services to address customers’ evolving information security, risk management, and compliance challenges. Neohapsis provides risk management, compliance, cloud, application, mobile, and infrastructure security solutions to Fortune 500 customers.

Together, Cisco, Neohapsis and our partner ecosystem will deliver comprehensive services to help our customers build the security capabilities required to remain secure and competitive in today’s markets. This will help our customers overcome operational and technical security vulnerabilities, achieve a comprehensive view of their risks, take advantage of new business models, and define structured approaches for better protection.

The Neohapsis team will join the Cisco Security Services organization under the leadership of Senior Vice President and General Manager Bryan Palma. The acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of fiscal year 2015. We look forward to Neohapsis’ outstanding team and technology joining Cisco!

Tags: acquisition, advisory, Bryan Palma, Hilton Romanski, M&A, Mergers and Acquisitions, Neohapsis, Risk Management, security, services

Today, Cisco takes another important step towards realizing our plans to create the world’s largest global Intercloud – a worldwide network of interconnected clouds and cloud service providers.

Our intent to acquire Metacloud, an OpenStack-based private cloud-as-a-service company, advances our strategy and delivers value to customers—right now. Metacloud provides IT teams with another way to accelerate their journey to the cloud and to gain an on-ramp to the Intercloud. By catalyzing the creation of the Intercloud, Cisco can fundamentally transform how IT and cloud services are bought, sold, aggregated and consumed.

Cisco’s vision is for an OpenStack-based Intercloud that allows organizations and users to combine and move high-value workloads – including data and applications – across different public or private clouds as needed. Doing so easily and securely, while maintaining essential network and security policies as well as full compliance with local data sovereignty laws, is critical.

Metacloud deploys, operates and manages OpenStack-based production-ready private clouds in any customer data center. Together, Cisco and Metacloud will enable the creation of hybrid cloud environments that combine service provider public cloud deployments with remotely-managed OpenStack private clouds. Bottom line for customers: More agility for less money.

Our customers and partners see the value proposition clearly and have rallied around Cisco’s Intercloud vision and strategy over the last year. Many leading companies are working with us in the adoption of the Intercloud. Among them, key service providers and cloud providers, as well as important technology partners, including Dimension Data, Johnson Controls, NetApp, Red Hat, Sungard, Telstra, and VCE.

Metacloud will become a critical part of our Cloud Services portfolio under the leadership of Faiyaz Shahpurwala.

Stay tuned for more details in the weeks to come!

Tags: acquisitions, acquistion, Cisco, cisco intercloud, cloud, Cloud Computing, cloud services, Faiyaz Shahpurwala, Hilton Romanski, InterCloud, Internet of Everything, IoE, M&A, Metacloud

Collaboration technology gives us the ability to work together anywhere, on any device, at any time. With more and more people using smartphones and tablets to do their work, it is more important than ever that enterprise collaboration delivers high quality voice, video, chat and online sharing instantly, to any device on any platform.

Today, I am pleased to announce Cisco’s acquisition of Assemblage to help us capture the ongoing market transitions of mobility, cloud and the Internet of Everything (IoE). Assemblage has built a talented team of web developers to deliver the tools and the infrastructure to enable simple, real-time collaboration through the browser to any device, without the need for downloads, plugins, or installations.

Assemblage offers real-time collaboration apps for shared whiteboarding, presentation broadcasting and screensharing. Users are able to collaborate simply via their browser with one-click, instantly accessing collaboration apps delivered via the cloud. Assemblage’s technology also integrates with popular third party cloud services and supports 40 different file types to enable quick and efficient collaboration.

With this acquisition, Assemblage brings a strong team of engineers with deep web development expertise to Cisco’s Collaboration Technology Group (CTG), enabling Cisco to accelerate innovation and develop simple, easy to use, next generation collaboration solutions. In addition, Assemblage’s experience integrating with third party cloud ecosystem applications like Box and Google shows a close alignment to Cisco’s collaboration strategy and our commitment to simplicity and interoperability.

We are excited to welcome Assemblage to our collaboration team. Together, Cisco and Assemblage will provide simple, easy-to-use solutions that help employees work smarter together from virtually anywhere.

Tags: acquisition, Assemblage, cloud, cloud collaboration, collaboration, Collaboration Technology Group, Hilton Romanski, Internet of Everything, IoE, M&A, web development

Every day our world becomes increasingly connected. And as the Internet of Everything (IoE) continues to develop, service providers who provide us with video, voice, and data services are faced with managing explosive growth of demand on their network, including the number of applications and platforms needed to improve the way we live, learn, work and play.

All of this makes networks more complex and expensive to manage.  At the same time, increased competition is driving service providers to introduce new services more rapidly. While Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and network programmability both help improve scale and functionality of networks for service providers, they do not solve the bottleneck caused by operational complexity.

That is why today, I am pleased to announce our intent to acquire Tail-f Systems, a leading provider of multi-vendor network orchestration solutions for traditional and virtual networks. Tail-f will help achieve our goal of aiding customers in their quest to simplify and automate network management, enabling service innovation and deployment acceleration. The acquisition of Tail-f accelerates Cisco’s cloud virtualization strategy of delivering software that increases value to our customers’ applications and services, while supporting Cisco’s long-standing commitment to open standards, architectures, and multi-vendor environments.

Tail-f’s innovative and talented team is also the thought leader around the development and implementation of the NETCONF protocol and YANG data modeling language, which is the leading industry approach to simplifying and automating networks. Tail-f also has an amazing team of talented engineers. Tail-f’s talent and technology, when added to our existing offerings, will enhance how Cisco addresses network orchestration and will help simplify and automate how physical and virtual networks are both provisioned and managed.

We couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity to continue driving leadership in cloud virtualization and orchestration with the addition of Tail-f. Stay tuned for more details in the weeks and months to come.  And welcome Tail-f!

Tags: acquisition, Hilton Romanski, M&A, network management, NFV, orchestration, Service Orchestration

For cyber attackers, and those who defend against them, the stakes could not be higher than they are right now.  There’s no question that security is a top priority for organizations and the threat landscape is more dynamic than ever. Given the explosion in the amount of information being created and exchanged, driven by mobility, cloud computing, and the Internet of Everything (IoE), the number of cyber attacks will continue to increase—and with greater speed and complexity. Companies need threat-centric security solutions to address the full attack continuum – before, during, and after an attack.

Today, I am pleased to announce Cisco’s intent to acquire ThreatGRID, headquartered in New York, NY. ThreatGRID offers dynamic malware analysis and threat intelligence technology, both on-premise and in the cloud. This helps organizations and security teams defend proactively against and quickly respond to advanced cyber attacks and malware outbreaks.

The acquisition of ThreatGRID and its team of security innovators strengthen Cisco’s security strategy to deliver intelligent and comprehensive cybersecurity for the real world. ThreatGRID’s technology enhances Cisco’s Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) portfolio, originally developed by Sourcefire, acquired in 2013. ThreatGRID’s on-premise products also expand our ability to help protect customers with in-house data retention requirements. AMP addresses our customers’ security needs from network to endpoint and delivers comprehensive malware-defeating capabilities, including detection and blocking, continuous analysis and retrospective remediation of advanced threats. The combination of Cisco and ThreatGRID will enhance our already strong capabilities to aggregate and correlate data to identify advanced and evasive cyber threats and provide intelligent cybersecurity solutions for the real world.

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and investments are a key part of our innovation strategy that includes build, buy, partner, and integrate. This acquisition further supports Cisco’s priority to deliver innovative security offerings and to be the number one IT company, and security partner, to our customers. The acquisition is expected to close in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2014. We are very excited to welcome ThreatGRID’s outstanding team and technology to Cisco.

Tags: acquisition, AMP, Hilton Romanski, M&A, security, security business group