It has been exactly one year to the day since we announced our partnership with Viptela to provide a unified view of Viptela software-defined wide area networks (SD-WANs) along with all other cloud and data center infrastructure, all through the Zenoss platform. An SD-WAN is a software-based network that enables companies to connect the networks of geographically dispersed offices. Last week, Cisco Systems (CSCO) announced their intent to acquire the SD-WAN leader, reportedly for $610 million, and we couldn’t be happier for them.
Viptela was founded in 2012 and raised more than $108 million in funding, including its most recent round of $75 million in May 2016. The company reportedly had $25 million in trailing twelve months (TTM) revenue, which is a 24x multiple — a very strong multiple for an enterprise software company, by any standard.
Zenoss and Viptela have long shared a common philosophy on delivering a cloud-first approach for end-to-end visibility and intelligence for the largest enterprises and service providers in the world. In this November 2016 blog post, Kent Erickson revealed that Zenoss and Viptela are monitoring the world’s largest SD-WAN network. In that representative model for joint customers, a multibillion-dollar financial institution was already using Zenoss to manage their massive data center deployments and was turning to Viptela’s leading SD-WAN technology to connect and manage 2,700 branch offices and 5,400 policy-managed routers.
At that time, Erickson referenced Jim Duffy, senior analyst, networking, at 451 Research, who wrote that, “Distributed enterprises are using high-volume cloud applications that suffer from latency, poor quality of service, and downtime. Software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) solutions help address the network challenges and benefit greatly from a unified monitoring solution for end-to-end visibility into all transactions. Key relationships like this one between Zenoss and Viptela are forming to address this.”
You never know how acquisitions may affect relationships with your partners (typically any effect takes time). But like Viptela, Cisco is also a key Zenoss technology partner — for a quick rundown on the deep ties between the two companies, check out the “Top 5 Things You Should Know About Zenoss & Cisco” data sheet.. Not only does Zenoss provide unique software solutions for ACI and NFV environments, Cisco UCS Performance Manager (UCS PM) is software developed by Zenoss and rebranded by Cisco.
For years, Cisco has leveraged Zenoss because of our cloud-first approach for end-to-end visibility and intelligence for the largest enterprises and service providers in the world. Sound familiar? The Zenoss-Viptela approach is very much aligned with Cisco’s digital network architecture (DNA) — the visionary push to software-driven, automated data centers that are architected to manage the daunting complexity of modern enterprise IT challenges around big data, mobility and the internet of things (IoT).
So who are the real winners in the Cisco-Viptela acquisition? There’s no question it is the customers. While Cisco and Zenoss and Viptela have already been delivering jointly-developed software-defined solutions, this will further cement the partnerships and is a huge advancement for tighter integrations, a completely unified approach, and the ultimate benefit of end-to-end intelligent service assurance. In addition to the intelligent service assurance Zenoss provides for Cisco UCS, ACI and NFVI, we’re excited to add Viptela’s SD-WAN technology to that list of Cisco offerings. In the end, this will result in a more unified service assurance system for Cisco/Zenoss/Viptela customers.
In the quest for IT management that is uniform and singularly orchestrated, this is a big step in the right direction.
