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Cisco slurps Viptela to bolster SD-WAN management

US$610 million shaves a third from last year's valuation

Cisco has just paid $US610 million to buy an software-defined WAN outfit founded and managed by former Cisco execs.

The acquisition is a bit bruising for investors in the company, Viptela, who include outfits like Sequoia Capital, Redline Capital, Northgate Capital and Moment Ventures. Last year, the company was valued at close to $900 million.

Its Cisco alumni include former CEO and current board member Amir Khan, current CEO Praveen Akkiraju, and CTO Khalid Raza.

Viptela's specialty is pushing SD-WAN management into the cloud. The company's Rob Salvagno writes in a canned statement that the suite the company developed covers cloud orchestration, branch network management, and overlay technologies.

“Customers can centrally manage the WAN with a real-time dashboard view to monitor the health of their network and improve connectivity,” he writes.

Post-acquisition, Viptela will become part of Cisco's Networking and Security Group's Enterprise Routing team, under the hand of senior veep and general manager David Goeckeler.

The transaction ends a relatively quiet period for Switchzilla. Under previous CEO John Chambers, the company had a limitless appetite for acquisitions, but the Viptela buy is only the second in 2017 (the first was its $3.7 billion purchase of AppDynamics in January).

As noted by LightReading's Carol Wilson, Cisco and Viptela shared a customer in Verizon; the SD-WAN startup also scored wins at Singtel and with service providers in Japan and Pakistan. ®

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