Cisco Further Strengthens Network Assurance with Intent to Acquire Accedian and SamKnows 

At Cisco Live, we shared our vision for Cisco Networking Cloud to help our customers deliver digital experiences to their users. Network assurance is critical to ensure these great experiences, requiring end-to-end visibility and insights like never before. Last week we announced our intent to acquire Accedian, and today, I’m excited to add our intent to acquire SamKnows.

From healthcare and business services to entertainment and government, the very foundation of our modern economy and everyday life runs on connectivity. More and more people and things are coming online while the innovation and sophistication of today’s applications for hybrid work, 5G, IoT, and AI expand. The complexity of software and the network has never been greater.

No one is more aware of this than enterprises, communication service providers (CSPs), digital service providers, and webscalers. They are balancing the escalating demand for new applications and services with rising user expectations for service quality and time to resolution. Success depends on fundamentally shifting from basic network connectivity at a massive scale to a deeper focus on real-time visibility, insights, and actions to delight customers and users across any application, cloud, and network.

Cisco already provides our customers with an unparalleled view of the connected world with the largest dataset in the industry. With visibility into over 400M endpoints, we have the most comprehensive set of network and user experience data for today’s Internet as well as the primary SaaS applications used by businesses, public clouds, and enterprises. However, there is a significant step-change in the type and granularity of network data required to keep the lifeblood of our modern economy—and everyday life—flowing. With the acquisitions of Accedian and SamKnows, we are providing a whole new level of network assurance and experience monitoring for our customers.

Last week, we announced our intent to acquire Accedian, an industry leader in network performance monitoring. Focused on the needs of CSPs, Accedian advances Cisco’s automated assurance solution with microsecond-level sensors and the powerful Skylight Analytics platform. Now, our customers can see—at a microscopic level—across their IT and network infrastructure to deeply understand every user’s experience at every moment. Real-time applications like video conferencing and industrial IoT require low-latency connectivity where precise data is needed to detect network degradation. Accedian provides unprecedented granularity to bolster Cisco’s capability in addressing highly sensitive services that will proliferate in the 5G era. It also gives us a unique opportunity to further enrich Cisco ThousandEyes with Accedian’s deep service provider domain data. Accedian will become part of the Data Center and Provider Connectivity business led by Kevin Wollenweber, and the dataset will be leveraged by our ThousandEyes end-to-end assurance portfolio.

Cisco’s intent to acquire SamKnows, a privately held broadband network monitoring company headquartered in London, England, will expand ThousandEyes’ industry-leading view of global internet health. Today, ThousandEyes has hundreds of thousands of vantage points across the Internet, in enterprise environments, and on user devices. With the addition of SamKnows’ millions of vantage points into the last mile, customers now have a single source of truth for how the Internet is performing across their entire infrastructure, including home and mobile device networks. Whether for hybrid work or consumer application delivery, optimizing and improving internet performance for everyone is just a click away. The SamKnows team will join the Network Assurance business led by Mohit Lad of ThousandEyes. Mohit shares more about this acquisition on our ThousandEyes blog.

Network disruption is not just downtime. It is a disruption of critical user experiences and loss of productivity, financial health, and brand reputation. With today’s announcements, we’re excited to further extend our end-to-end Network Assurance and visibility capabilities to empower our customers to thrive in a connected world.

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