Cisco Will Buy Network Monitoring Firm ThousandEyes

Cisco will reportedly spend nearly $1 billion to buy ThousandEyes for its application visibility and monitoring technology as the tech giant continues its software pursuit.

Cisco Systems said Thursday that it plans to acquire network monitoring company ThousandEyes.

The San Jose, Calif.-based tech giant will acquire its San Francisco-based neighbor, ThousandEyes. Bloomberg earlier reported that the price tag was nearly $1 billion.

Cisco and ThousandEyes did not immediately respond to CRN's request for comment before publication.

[Related: Cisco, AppDynamics Integrate Monitoring Tools To Unite App, Infrastructure Teams]

“We decided to become part of Cisco because we saw the potential to do much more, much faster, and truly create a legacy for ThousandEyes,” said ThousandEyes CEO Mohit Lad in an online post. “It’s a great outcome no doubt for employees and investors, but we also made this decision knowing this would be a great outcome for our customers—whose best interests have always been at the center of every decision we make at ThousandEyes.”

ThousandEyes, with 400 employees, specializes in software that provides actionable intelligence to help enterprises improve their digital experience, especially as applications and workloads move off-premises and into cloud environments. The company's technology can give businesses better visibility and monitoring into their entire infrastructure to identify issues and outages.

Cisco has been on a mission over the past three years to boost its software and services focus as it pivots away from hardware. An acquisition of ThousandEyes could complement Cisco's application performance and monitoring business, AppDynamics, which it acquired in 2017.

"ThousandEyes … provides Internet intelligence at a scale and accuracy never seen before. In a time when every meeting is held, and document shared, through connected applications; the need for ThousandEyes technology has never been so high," said Todd Nightingale, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's $34 billion Enterprise Networking and Cloud Business.

ThousandEyes’ technology will be absorbed into Cisco’s core Enterprise Networking and Cloud, and AppDynamics portfolios, according to the two companies. The acquisition is expected to close before the end of Cisco’s Q1 FY’21. Via the terms of the deal, ThousandEyes will join Cisco's newly-formed Networking Services business unit, reporting to Todd Nightingale.

ThousandEyes CEO and co-founder Mohit Lad will take on the role of general manager of the ThousandEyes business and Co-Founder and CTO Ricardo Oliveira will continue on with Cisco as well, heading ThousandEyes' product vision and innovation strategy.

ThousandEyes in 2019 raised $50 million in Series D funding, which the company said was going toward growing its global operations. The firm opened operations in Ireland, Australia, Germany and The Netherlands.