Cisco eyes up ThousandEyes purchase

Cisco has announced its intention to acquire internet and cloud intelligence platform ThousandEyes.

The ThousandEyes platform is said to deliver the only collectively powered view of the internet, enabling enterprises and service providers to improve the quality of the digital experience. It takes data from points throughout the global internet – such as from within datacentres and virtual private clouds and on end-user devices – to expose key dependencies and bottlenecks that could affect service delivery.

ThousandEyes says its technology enables businesses to see, understand and improve how their customers and employees experience any digital website, application or service, and react to any outage issues.

To assist businesses at the start of the Covid-19 outbreak in March, ThousandEyes released its Global Internet Outages Map, an at-a-glance visualisation of global internet health powered by its Internet Insights tool. The always-on map is designed to give businesses a near-real-time understanding of ongoing and recent internet outages that may affect the end-user experiences of their customers or employees.

Explaining its intention to buy ThousandEyes, Cisco said the last few years have seen a rapid acceleration of cloud adoption, widespread use of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, and a reliance on the internet and networks outside enterprise control.

This, it said, has increased dependence on the internet and other third-party infrastructures, compounded during the Covid-19 pandemic, substantially reducing enterprise IT teams’ ability to predict, visualise and control operational behaviour.

The result, said Cisco, is often a chaotic and unmanageable IT environment that makes issue resolution a time-consuming ordeal that can potentially have a massive impact on customer experience, brand reputation and revenue.

Cisco said it saw the combination of its own expertise in network and application performance and ThousandEyes’ visibility into the internet as providing an end-to-end view into the digital delivery of applications and services.

It added that the acquisition’s synergies, with common tooling and sharing datasets for application and network health, would also help remove silos, giving IT teams real-time visibility into application performance degradation issues. Also, it would allow businesses to pinpoint deficiencies and improve network and application performance across enterprise and cloud networks.

On completion of the deal – expected to close before the end of the first quarter of Cisco’s 2021 financial year – Cisco intends to incorporate ThousandEyes’ capabilities across its core enterprise networking and cloud, and AppDynamics portfolios to enhance visibility across the enterprise.

ThousandEyes will join Cisco’s newly formed Networking Services business unit. ThousandEyes CEO and co-founder Mohit Lad will become general manager of ThousandEyes, and co-founder and CTO Ricardo Oliveira will continue to drive its product vision and innovation strategy.