Cisco to buy P-Cube for about $200 m
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The company&#39;s sixth buy this year is meant to aid service providers in controlling and managing Internet-based networks, such as VoIP and interactive gaming.
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Cisco Systems is making an acquisition designed to reinforce its security lineup, the company said Thursday. The networking giant announced it will pay $74 million in cash for San Francisco start-up Perfigo, a developer of network access control products.
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Cisco will pay approximately $200 million in cash and options. The acquisition of P-Cube is subject to various standard closing conditions and is expected to close in the first quarter of Cisco&#39;s fiscal year 2005.
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Cisco Systems&#39; announcement Monday that it will acquire privately held startup Protego Networks for $65 million adds a critical piece to Cisco&#39;s strategy for becoming a security vendor.
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(InfoWorld) - Cisco Systems will begin offering IronPort's security filtering tools to its firewall customers after the networking giant's acquisition of the company closes on June 25. On tour to evangelize the benefits of the buyout to media, analysts and customers, top Cisco security executives and IronPort Chief Executive Scott Weiss said that the combined company will move quickly to create a software upgrade package that will provide content filtering functionality and behavioral reputation intelligence into the networking market leader's 2.5 million existing firewall systems. Once the deal closes on Monday, Weiss will assume a role as a senior security marketing executive with Cisco, he said. The for-pay security add-on derived from IronPort, which has maintained a San Bruno, Calif. headquarters, will allow customers to employ what the company has dubbed as "wide traffic inspection" at the firewall, arming users with more comprehensive network traffic analysis tools, the executives said. The content filtering package represents only the first of many opportunities borne of San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco's $830 million buyout of the firm, said Weiss and Mick Scully, vice president of product management at Cisco's Security Technology Group.Â  "The e-mail and Web filtering capabilities we bring into Cisco's self defending network vision will allow customers to do more granular filtering of traffic traveling across ports that have traditionally been left open by firewalls," Weiss said. "Today, most threats are coming into the network as links embedded in e-mail messages; putting this type of intelligence at the firewall will increase its efficacy in stopping those attacks." Through blending the malware-distribution data gathered by IronPort's SenderBase IP address reputation service into Cisco's Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) firewalls, the devices will become more dynamic security filtering gateways that can detect a far greater number of potential attacks before they enter the network, the companies claim. "As Cisco takes what it has been doing at the network layer and adds content awareness, customers will be provided with a whole new set of traffic monitoring abilities," said Scully. "This is a new business model for us, but we believe we can take advantage of the fact that content filtering has traditionally been a highly-fragmented market." Scully estimates that the firewall market currently represents a roughly $5 billion annual sales opportunity. By integrating content filtering, which Cisco projects as a $2 billion per-year market that is growing at 30 percent per year, the executive said that the massive networking and security firm expects its products to serve a $10 billion per-annum segment sometime around 2011. For its part, Weiss said that IronPort is expecting to report growth of 70 percent for its current fiscal year, pushing its revenues over $200 million. After moving to integrate the filtering specialists' tools into its firewall business, Scully said that Cisco would begin adding IronPort's technologies into its Integrated Services Router (ISR) products. "We'll be integrating IronPort's content and e-mail filtering technologies into our switching and routing products over the next several years," said the colorful Cisco security executive. "This is a strategy that reaches beyond the current wave of Web 2.0 technologies and services oriented architecture technologies into the next decade and beyond as customers demand more integrated security features." Weiss said that another immediate benefit of the merger will be an opportunity for Cisco to expand its abilities to provide data leakage prevention (DLP) protection at the network gateway. "We'll be looking to leverage the footprint of firewall and switches to better inform customers about many different aspects of security," he said. "Anything we can add to what Cisco is already doing has a network effect, and there will be a lot of opportunities for us to help companies monitor for malware and even look into issues such as data leakage prevention." At least one industry analyst said that the IronPort acquisition dovetails nicely with emerging customer demands to look at patterns in IP traffic to eliminate malware attacks such as botnet programs -- without having a negative impact on their overall network performance. "When you look at reputation services, if you know who the people are who are sending out spam or malware, there's a big opportunity to filter-out a lot of unwanted content at the gateway," said Andrew Jaquith, analyst with Boston-based research firm Yankee Group. "To do that you must have visibility into the actual flow of data, and that's what Cisco and IronPort should be able to provide." Selling additional features and services to existing customers is a sensible place for the two companies to begin their joint efforts, but their new products will need to prove their efficacy at stopping threats such as botnets which remain problematic for many large enterprises today, to gain wide acceptance quickly, the analyst said. "If you know that certain IP ranges are harboring botnets, or see something within the company network trying to communicate with those addresses, you have a pretty good clue that you've got a problem," he said. "That's one of the best potential uses for tying-in visibility into external reputations and correlating that with things going on inside the network." Jaquith believes that IronPort's technology will find its way into many of Cisco's routing and switching products over the next several years, and he cited the ability to leverage reputation-oriented information about what types of Web sites endpoint devices have visited in Cisco's network access control (NAC) technologies as another potential benefit of the merger. "Cisco really wants to be thought of as a security player, and for them to do that, it means they needed to move up the stack a couple of layers and start looking at e-mail and layer seven type-applications, they really needed to play in that space," the analyst said. "It's a mature market, and Cisco picked a strong company to help plant its security flag a little deeper."
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IT management is firmly anchored at number six, with outsourcing, cost control, and process improvement the order of the day. Cisco Systems signed an agreement on Wednesday to acquire network management start-up Jahi Networks for $16 million.
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Cisco Systems said Wednesday that it would buy Airespace, a San Jose maker of networking gear, for &#36;450 million in stock in an effort to bolster sales of wireless equipment.
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Cisco is continuing their plans to establish a dominating position in the Japanese market. They recently signed a hardware deal with local player Fujitsu to manufacture high-end routers and switches for the local market.
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Cisco Systems stepped up its commitment to helping partners deliver services with last week&#39;s acquisition of publicly traded managed service provider NetSolve in a deal valued at nearly $200 million.
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Networking equipment maker Cisco Systems is to buy Perfigo for $74m (Â£40.5m), boosting the company&#39;s efforts to secure network &quot;endpoints&quot; and protect them from worms, viruses and hacking.
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Cisco Systems(R) (NASDAQ: CISCO) today announced that it has completed the purchase of select assets of privately-held Utah Street Networks, Inc., the operator of the social networking site Tribe.net.
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InfoWorld - Cisco announced plans this week for a $135 million acquisition of Reactivity, a maker of XML gateway and security hardware designed to speed and secure up Web services traffic on enterprise networks.
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Cisco Systems signed an agreement on Wednesday to acquire network management start-up Jahi Networks for $16 million. Jahi, a San Jose, Calif.
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Femtocells are the new black Networking giant Cisco is investing an undisclosed amount in ip.access - the Cambridge company which makes femtocells and picocells.â¦
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Telecommunications and networking equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc is planning to launch a new Japanese R&amp;D facility early in 2005 at a cost of $12 million spread over five years.
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A research center in Pittsburgh as well as a broadband service provider and an academic network in Japan all have bought Cisco System's first totally new core routing platform in seven years, which was introduced with fanfare in June, the company announced Monday.
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P-Cube develops service control platforms, which help service providers identify subscribers, classify applications, improve service performance and charge for multiple services without costly infrastructure upgrades, Cisco said.