Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire ThousandEyes, Inc. – Network Intelligence for What’s Next

Today businesses, schools and governments depend on applications and digital services more than ever. Those applications run in data centers and clouds around the world. Our users and sites are connected over broadband, SD-WAN and cellular networks. It is key for every technology group to understand that the Internet is mission critical and business critical for all of us. It is now our corporate network, and we need to have better visibility, intelligence and insights of the Internet than we ever had from private networks.

Today I’m excited to announce Cisco’s intent to acquire ThousandEyes. Headquartered in San Francisco and founded in 2010, ThousandEyes provides Internet intelligence at a scale and accuracy never seen before. In a time when every meeting is held and every document is shared through connected applications, the need for ThousandEyes technology has never been so high.

ThousandEyes’ technology warns us when a user’s experience is less than ideal and can pinpoint where those failures were caused. With thousands of agents deployed throughout the Internet, ThousandEyes’ platform has an unprecedented understanding of the Internet and grows more intelligent with ever deployment. With ThousandEyes, AppDynamics and Cisco SD-WAN technology, we will have the ability to improve the performance, reliability and scalability of all the applications on which we depend so much.

ThousandEyes’ network intelligence platform focuses on the user experience and network performance. The platform gathers data from various points throughout the public Internet — from within data centers, colocation centers, campuses, branches and on end-user devices —to identify dependencies that impact service delivery. This enables businesses to see, understand and improve all our users’ digital experience.

Frequently, when acquiring important technologies like this, we try to find the right product analogy or comparison to an existing business or product. Consider this; is ThousandEyes the ultimate IP SLA for a multi-cloud, SD-WAN world?  Yes.* Does ThousandEyes give network-as-a-service offerings the visibility they need to respond proactively, now that the Internet is our Enterprise network? Yes. However, I believe more than anything, ThousandEyes is to the network what Talos is to security.

In 2013, after the acquisition of Sourcefire, we merged Sourcefire’s Vulnerability Research Team with Cisco TRAC and SecApps groups to form Cisco Talos, our security threat research team. Since then, all Cisco security products have been fueled by threat intelligence from Talos. I had an incredible view of this when Talos WannaCry signatures were pushed to Meraki MXs and we started detecting true WannaCry infiltration around the world. We were even able to reach out to those affected and help them through the mitigation process. This type of deep intelligence changed the game for our customer’s security posture. I’m incredibly excited about ThousandEyes, because ThousandEyes is Cisco’s new Internet Intelligence group. All of our networking products can become more intelligent and more proactive by leveraging this technology.

The ThousandEyes acquisition will enable deeper and broader visibility to pin-point deficiencies and improve the network and application performance across all networks your business relies on by enabling end-to-end visibility when accessing cloud applications. Internet Intelligence won’t just improve networking reliability, but end-to-end application experience. Embedding ThousandEyes technology into Cisco’s networking portfolio will give unprecedented intelligence on the largest deployed base of networking equipment in the world.

ThousandEyes’ further complement Cisco’s capabilities with proactive application modeling to help improve application quality of experience (QoE). Cisco will incorporate ThousandEyes’ capabilities in our AppDynamics application intelligence portfolio to enhance visibility across the enterprise, internet and the cloud. AppDynamics, another acquisition that cemented Cisco’s place in the business intelligence, analytics and IT operations market, will be able to offer even deeper application insights paired with true Network Intelligence from ThousandEyes.

I can’t tell you how excited I am about ThousandEyes. To all of ThousandEyes’ employees and partners, welcome to Cisco. To everyone looking for more intelligent, reliable and agile application and internet experience, come take a look at this amazing technology and stay tuned for developments as we embed ThousandEyes into Cisco products throughout our networking, cloud and application offerings.

Source: cisco.com