Cisco today announced plans to acquire ThousandEyes, a multicloud network monitoring vendor based in San Francisco. The companies declined to share financial terms of the deal, but Bloomberg, which broke the news and seemingly prompted a rushed announcement, reported it was nearly $1 billion. 

“It’s an incredibly well built company with some of the most important technology in the world, especially right now,” Todd Nightingale, SVP and GM of enterprise networking and cloud at Cisco, said during a conference call. 

“ThousandEyes has a really unique value in providing true internet intelligence and in-application experience intelligence, and gives both of these things in such an amazing package,” he said, adding that it also ties Cisco’s networking portfolio and its AppDynamics portfolio together. “It’s going to help drive network-as-a-services offerings from Cisco for years to come.” 

ThousandEyes was “built around this notion that the internet becomes the central nervous system of user experience, and it’s a big black box. It’s something that you don’t control,” ThousandEyes CEO Mohit Lad said during the call. The company works with close to 100 Fortune 500 companies, including Cisco, he said. 

Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research, described it as an “outstanding” move by Cisco. “With the shift to the cloud, work from home, mobile, etcetera, it’s fair to say the internet is as big a part of a corporate network as private networks are,” he told SDxCentral.

Cisco Minimizes User Experience ‘Blind Spot’

“The internet has historically been a big ‘blind spot’ for customers. Now with ThousandEyes, Cisco can bring that rich set of internet knowledge and combine it with the data it generates with its own equipment,” Kerravala said. 

“This is a big step in removing the delineation between private and public networks. There’s one network and the experience from the cloud to the company network to the hand needs to be monitored,” he explained. 

Cisco said it plans to integrate ThousandEyes’ capabilities across its core enterprise networking, cloud, and AppDynamics portfolios to achieve that goal. Kerravala said he also expects it to blend with Cisco’s SD-WAN offerings, Webex, and other platforms delivered via the internet. 

“Cloud ops teams and app deployment teams, they care about the user experience, what’s happening on the applications, on the servers, and what’s happening in the delivery of those applications,” Nightingale said. 

The internet is important for cloud operations and online experiences, but it’s also “becoming the underlying thing that makes SD-WAN possible to a large extent, so it’s the whole black box that needs to be decoded,” Lad said.

Cisco Envisions Automated Future Powered by ThousandEyes

“The cloud journey was something that really made the internet even more important than ever before, right, because you lose control of the data center when you rely on the internet,” he explained. “When you think about whether it’s cloud or [software-as-a-service], effectively it’s having elements outside of your four walls that you rely on for delivering a user experience. Even though you don’t control it, it’s still your problem and you have to fix it.”

In the multicloud environment, ThousandEyes has the “unique ability to not just see the internet but to also see what’s going on in these different cloud providers,” Lad said. 

“All of our systems are going to be simpler and we can just dramatically empower far more people by democratizing technology by making it simpler to consume,” Nightingale said. “We have an opportunity to make it even simpler by embedding ThousandEyes agents into millions and millions of Cisco products already deployed, customers are able to turn this on with a single click of a switch with a single license.”

This will eventually lead to a fully automated network architecture wherein adjustments based on ThousandEyes insights can be instantiated automatically, he added. 

“The whole objective of ThousandEyes is to help you navigate a network, which has tens of thousands of different organizations connecting to each other and how it’s impacting you, so it is a really complex problem,” Lad said. 

ThousandEyes released its Synthetics monitoring service for API-heavy applications in September 2019 and expanded its multicloud monitoring capabilities to Alibaba Cloud the month prior. 

“We need to be providing this intelligence for our customers,” Nightingale said. “If the pandemic response around the world has taught us anything, it’s the timeliness of bringing ThousandEyes and Cisco technology together and providing it in the simplest possible way to our users right now.”

Cisco and ThousandEyes have been pursuing this deal for the past two to three months and, because of the COVID-19 crisis, it’s the first acquisition in Cisco’s history that was completed in an entirely virtual manner. No enthusiastic handshakes or popped champagne bottles this go around.