Extreme targets SD-WAN services with Ipanema buy

With an eye toward reinforcing its cloud management business, Extreme Networks said it will acquire Ipanema’s SD-WAN business for about $73 million in cash.

Ipanema and its SD-WAN business has been owned by France-based network orchestration firm Infovista since 2015 and has approximately 400 customers, mostly in Europe. Its cloud-managed SD-WAN platform is designed to deliver different workloads and applications securely across conventional wide-area networks and multicloud service providers, according to the company.

Ipanema’s technology automatically adjusts application traffic flows based on real-time network conditions, which increases performance and improves quality of experience for end-users and delivers savings for the business, Extreme CEO Ed Meyercord said in a statement. “We plan to expand upon these capabilities to establish an infinitely distributed SD-WAN and secure solution within the ExtremeCloud portfolio,” Meyercord stated. 

ExtremeCloud IQ (XIQ) is the company’s core cloud-based wireless and wired network-management offering. XIQ offers a variety of wired and wireless management, analytics, location tracking, security and IoT support. It supports a variety of cloud providers including AWS, GCP, and Azure.

Extreme has a history of buying technologies to further its product family. Since 2016 it has acquired Zebra, Brocade, Avaya, and Aerohive to help it build a wired and wireless network- and cloud-management family under the XIQ umbrella.

The company continues to grow financially and hit a record $1.009 billion in annual revenue for FY2021, which ended June 30. “The $1 billion mark has been a long-term goal of ours, and it’s a key milestone that represents the significant growth and positioning of the company,” Meyercord told Network World in a recent interview. 

The Ipanema acquisition is expected to close in October 2021.