The News: Cisco announced its dual intent to acquire Accedian, a supplier of network performance monitoring software, and SamKnows, a privately held broadband networking monitoring firm headquartered in London. Read the full blog from Cisco here.
Cisco Eyes Perfect Network Assurance Vision with Accedian and SamKnows Acquisitions
Analyst Take: Cisco’s dual intention of acquiring both Accedian and SamKnows is aimed directly at bolstering the Cisco Networking Cloud vision of better enabling its customers to deliver improved digital experiences to their users. For Cisco, the key to improving digital experiences is delivering end-to-end visibility and attaining insight breakthroughs.
Cisco is targeting enterprises, communications service providers (CSPs), digital service providers, and webscalers with the acquisitions. We see such Cisco customers and prospects prioritizing real-time visibility, insights, and actions to meet the scaling and rising service quality demands for new services and applications throughout increasingly intricate cloud, application, and network environments.
Today, Cisco already provides visibility into over 400 million endpoints generating detailed and systematic user and network data across internet and key SaaS applications. Through the Accedian and SamKnows acquisitions, Cisco aims to augment the network assurance and experience monitoring capabilities that are vital to bolstering the business outcomes of its customers.
From my view, Cisco needed to acquire Accedian to improve its automated assurance proposition, embedded in its Data Center and Provider Connectivity business, by locking down Accedian’s microsecond-level sensors and widely proven Skylights Analytics platform. I discern that the Skylight platform has stood out in the crowded assurance market by proactively ensuring networks and cloud applications fulfill increasingly stringent performance requirements, optimizing network capacity, and advancing quality of experience.
Specifically, Cisco plans to integrate Accedian’s service provider domain data into the ThousandEyes end-to-end (E2E) assurance portfolio to deliver the granularity and precise data critical to detecting network degradation across fast-growing, real-time applications such as industrial IoT and video conferencing as well as 5G environments. Plus, Cisco improves its portfolio security capabilities by bolstering the E2E visibility and monitoring functions that are critical to help identify security threats, minimizing the network disruptions that can undermine business outcomes, diminish productivity, and harm brand reputation.
Since Accedian already has deals with 75% of the world’s top CSPs, Cisco gains swift credibility in driving more E2E automation implementations. Notably, I see Cisco benefiting from Accedian’s targeting of the private 5G market, particularly the manufacturing segment where Accedian notes that 76% of companies plan to use private 5G by 2024.
Accordingly, Cisco preemptively ensures that rivals are unable to walk away with Accedian’s high performance service assurance capabilities. The deal follows a string of high-profile acquisitions involving the takeover of service assurance specialists, including especially Juniper’s acquisition of Netrounds, which Cisco had also engaged in collaboration, as well as Ericsson’s purchase of CENX, Oracle’s deal for Federos, Ciena’s snap-up of Centina, and Amdocs’ takeover of TEOCO’s assurance unit after UK regulatory delay upended the MYCOM OSI acquisition proposal.
Intriguingly, Accedian also works closely with VMware, a Cisco competitor across market segments such as data center virtualization and SD-WAN, although Cisco has already stated its commitment to uphold all existing Accedian business relations. Of greater importance, Cisco and Accedian have worked closely together for years, as recently evidenced by Accedian’s booth presence at Cisco Live 2023, which provides the technical and business foundation for what I expect will prove a smooth integration process.
With the SamKnows deal, Cisco gains SamKnows’ millions of vantage points into the last mile, further strengthening ThousandEyes’ hundreds of thousand vantage point capabilities throughout the internet, enterprise environments, and user devices. As such, through the integration of SamKnows into its Network Assurance business, Cisco is anticipating that customers can attain a single source of truth for how the internet is performing across their entire infrastructure, including home and mobile devices in the hybrid workforce era.
Cisco also obtains SamKnows’ 14+ years of experience at honing and perfecting internet performance measurements that results in the collected data that can be used as a common language across government regulators, ISPs, academics, and content providers to improve and optimize internet performance for all society.
Key Takeaways: Cisco Acquires Accedian and SamKnows
Cisco raises its end-to-end Network Assurance as well as Data Center and Provider Connectivity portfolio capabilities with the Accedian and SamKnows acquisitions, in my estimation. Now Cisco, through its ThousandEyes platform and comprehensive visibility portfolio assets, can enhance digital experiences across the global digital ecosystem by minimizing the network disruptions that can undermine business outcomes, diminish productivity, and harm brand reputation.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other insights from The Futurum Group:
Cisco Live 2023: Cisco and AT&T Join Forces to Elevate Mobile Experience for Hybrid Workforces
Cisco Live 2023: Cisco Launches AI-Powered Security Cloud to Empower Enterprise Security Teams
Author Information
Ron is an experienced, customer-focused research expert and analyst, with over 20 years of experience in the digital and IT transformation markets, working with businesses to drive consistent revenue and sales growth.
Ron holds a Master of Arts in Public Policy from University of Nevada — Las Vegas and a Bachelor of Arts in political science/government from William and Mary.
