Comcast Business acquired managed SD-WAN and secure access service edge (SASE) vendor Masergy today in a bid to grow its influence among large and midsized businesses.

While neither party disclosed the terms of the deal, Plano, Texas-based Masergy has raised $85 million in venture funding since it was founded in 2000. The company’s last funding round in 2005 raised $30 million, according to a Crunchbase report.

“Masergy provides a perfect complement to our portfolio of enterprise services and solutions and will allow us to instantly and dramatically amplify our growth in the global enterprise market,” Comcast Business President Bill Stemper said in a statement.

According to Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research, Masergy enables Comcast to address the needs of larger enterprise customers — a segment it's struggled to address in the past.

“Masergy offers a lot of high-touch services, which I think is what you need to compete for enterprise business,” he said. “I think what they're getting is a mature managed service provider that understands how to deal with a classic customer that Comcast [Business] has largely failed in going after... It does bring some large-enterprise cred to Comcast.”

Gary Barton, principal enterprise technology and services analyst at GlobalData, echoed many of Kerravala's sentiments, calling the combined service provider a “threatening new competitor” on the global telecom scene.

“Comcast's significant access network in the U.S., and to a less extent the U.K., form the ideal partner for Masergy’s global SDN network,” he wrote in a research note.

As part of the acquisition, Comcast Business inherits more than 1,400 customers spread across 100 countries. Many of these customers are using Masergy’s managed SD-WAN and SASE offerings, which are based on Fortinet’s FortiGate and FortiSASE platforms. This further extends Comcast Business’ managed SD-WAN and SASE offerings, which already included Palo Alto Networks and Versa.

“The Fortinet technology is an interesting one because I think it’s a good complement to what Versa does,” Kerravala added.

Comcast first entered the managed SD-WAN market in 2017 through a partnership with Versa. The company recently expanded that relationship to include SASE.

For customers eager to embrace a cloud-based SD-WAN or SASE architecture, Comcast Business’ Versa-based offerings are well positioned, Kerravala said. “But there are a lot of customers, especially large enterprises, that have large branch offices that don’t want to move away from the on-prem technology.” For those customers, Masergy’s, and by extension Fortinet’s, SD-WAN and SASE offerings are better suited, he added.

The acquisition nets Comcast Business more than managed SD-WAN or SASE. The service provider has invested heavily in automation and orchestration around SD-WAN, artificial intelligence operations (AIOps), unified-communications-as—a-service (UCaaS), among other technologies to differentiate itself.

“All the work Masergy has put into its AIOps solution actually is something that they can even use to scale down market,” Kerravala said. “The more you can automate, the better market there is for the service provider.”

Kerravala also highlighted Masergy’s recent Performance Edge offering, which uses WAN optimization and compression to provide an Ethernet-like network experience over a single broadband connection.

“Given Comcast’s last mile is primarily cable, that actually could be a pretty nice services that they can lay on top of that as a premium service,” he said.