Cisco to acquire Viptela

Cisco said it would acquire SD-WAN vendor Viptela Inc. in a deal valued at $610 million. The transaction, expected to close later this year, will fortify Cisco’s existing SD-WAN portfolio with additional cloud-based services, the company said in a blog post.

“Viptela’s technology is cloud-first, with a focus on simplicity and ease of deployment while simultaneously providing a rich set of capabilities and scale,” said Scott Harrell, Cisco’s senior vice president of product management, Enterprise Networking Group, in a statement. “With Viptela and Cisco, we will be able to deliver a comprehensive portfolio of comprehensive on-premises, hybrid and cloud-based SD-WAN solutions.”

Viptela, based in San Jose, Calif., emerged from stealth three years ago with an SD-WAN framework it called the Secure Extensible Network (SEN). The platform includes physical vEdge routers that form a secure data plane; a central controller runs on an x86 server–either on-site or in the cloud–and orchestrates connectivity among the routers. Viptela sells its framework to enterprises and its technology is also used to underpin managed SD-WAN services offered by a number of providers, including Verizon and Singtel.

SD-WAN continues to be a hot market, with revenues expected to eclipse $6 billion by 2020, according to IDC.

Cisco said the acquisition will dovetail with its Digital Network Architecture strategy to support software-driven networks that are more programmable, responsive and dynamic. Viptela will join Cisco’s enterprise routing unit within the vendor’s Networking and Security Group, led by Senior Vice President and General Manager David Geockeler.