Cisco to acquire ThousandEyes for $1Bn

Cisco, today, announced its intention to acquire the Internet and cloud platform, ThousandEyes. Although the amount was not disclosed officially, there have been reports by CNBC that the deal may close nearly a billion dollars.

ThousandEyes is a startup that offers software as a service (SaaS) aimed at monitoring network performance. The company monitors almost the whole internet to identify the source of performance problems of websites and web-based apps. For example, for a company X, it can determine if the outage of service is due to X or some other service-providers X is dependent on.

ThousandEyes will join Cisco’s newly-formed Networking and Cloud Services business, as the company plans to foray into the software monitoring side of the business along with Network Hardware. Todd Nightingale, Cisco’s Senior VP and General Manager, wrote in the blog post: “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.”

To assist startups and businesses at the start of COVID-19, ThousandEyes released its Global Outage Map that provides a visual of global internet health powered by its Internet Insights tool. It also provides IT teams a real-time visibility into application performance degradation issues.

ThousandEyes seems like a perfect fit for Cisco as it continues to build its subscription software empire to go alongside its enterprise. The deal is set to close sometime before the third quarter of 2020.