Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire Accedian: Accelerating High Performance Service Assurance 

In today’s world, almost every industry is undergoing digital transformation and connectivity is key to productivity, business efficiency, and service delivery. However, connectivity is not enough, and IT simplification is crucial to provide seamless digital outcomes and unified experiences. As a result, organizations must be able to more easily assure digital experiences over every network that matters to them, which is why network and service assurance is a strategic part of the Cisco Networking Cloud. 

Challenges 

Communications service providers (CSPs) and webscalers in particular are experiencing increasing subscriber expectations and stringent performance requirements that require real-time data and actionable insights to ensure their networks perform as expected. 

Solution 

To address these assurance challenges, Cisco is announcing its intent to acquire Accedian, an industry leading network performance monitoring partner that enables seamless operation of service provider transport and 5G networks. 

“Accedian was born in the heart of the world’s largest and most complex networks,” said Dion Joannou, CEO of Accedian. “When we were acquired by Bridge Growth Partners, a leading technology investment firm, in 2017 we transformed the company, accelerated its growth, and evolved to a SaaS-first service assurance platform.  Microseconds matter to customers and customer experience, and precise, granular performance visibility is a foundational requirement for closed-loop automation, agile telco cloud environments, and latency-sensitive 5G services. We look forward to bringing our critical capabilities to a wider set of solutions within Cisco’s Networking portfolio and taking the next step in the partnership we have built with Cisco and our joint customers over the last years.” 

As Dion and I have worked together over the past two years, I have come to know the Accedian team and their dedication to solving customer problems, their deep technical understanding of this market, and their great capacity to innovate to solve some of the biggest assurance challenges.  

During this time, Cisco and  Accedian have collaborated through the Cisco SolutionsPlus program to deliver a joint automation and assurance solution for service provider customers. Accedian greatly strengthens Cisco’s approach to assurance, helping to enable agility, efficiency, and the scale that service providers need to drive success. Accedian’s service assurance portfolio of microsecond level sensors and the powerful Skylight Analytics platform, coupled with Cisco’s robust portfolio, will enable Cisco to bring transformational solutions to our service provider customers. 

With  Accedian’s sophisticated network performance and user experience monitoring capabilities for CSP customers, Cisco has a unique opportunity to link that data into Cisco ThousandEyes’ cloud for end-to-end network assurance.  

We look forward to welcoming the  Accedian team and working to accelerate Cisco’s vision of bringing high-performance assurance to Service Providers. The  Accedian team will join my Data Center and Provider Connectivity organization within Cisco Networking. We expect to close the acquisition during the first quarter of Cisco’s FY24. We are excited to continue working with customers through the existing partnership and as one Cisco after close.  

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