Performance monitoring and software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) provider Riverbed has signed an agreement to acquire WiFi vendor Xirrus.
The terms of the deal were not revealed, but it is expected to close by early May, said Milind Bhise, senior director of product marketing at Riverbed.
“The enterprise network has four basic elements: local area network; enterprise data center; wide area network, which connects branch offices to headquarters, and cloud, said Bhise. “It’s important to have a unified method of managing these four elements and applying policies centrally.”
This is exactly what Riverbed's SD-WAN product SteelConnect aims to do, he added. From a component perspective, SteelConnect has a manager, secure SD-WAN gateways, branch LAN access points, integrated WAN optimization, and unified connectivity that connects branch offices to multiple clouds.
Xirrus will enable Riverbed to extend the WiFi and wired capabilities of SteelConnect. Specifically, Xirrus brings the company a WiFi suite including a broader set of access points, a better WiFi protocol, additional WiFi management tools, and new WiFi services.
“Xirrus access points give us much faster access to data that we didn’t have before,” Bhise said. Because the wireless company’s access points are able to gather application data on the edge, it gives users visibility into more thorough data, he claimed.
This also allows enterprises to understand the location of multiple WiFi connections as well as provide analytics into how these different networks are behaving.
Until Riverbed launched SteelConnect in September 2016, its primary focus had been in application performance monitoring (APM) and network performance monitoring (NPM).
However, this acquisition isn’t signaling that the company is moving away from these areas. Its monitoring product SteelCentral will also reap the benefits of Xirrus’ access points as they gather richer data on the edge, providing real-time analytics.
Founded in 2004, Xirrus is based in Thousand Oaks, California.