Cisco to acquire P-Cube for $200 million
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NEW YORK - Cisco Systems Inc. said Monday it has agreed to acquire Sunnyvale, California, software developer P-Cube Inc. in a cash-and-options deal Cisco valued at $200 million.
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SAN FRANCISCO - Cisco Systems Inc. channel partners will be able to offer real-time monitoring of enterprises' networks after the company agreed to acquire NetSolve Inc., the networking giant said Thursday.
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Cisco Systems Inc. of San Jose, Calif., Monday acquired privately held P-Cube Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif. P-Cube develops service control platforms, which help service providers
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Cisco has agreed to buy WiMax base station maker Navini Networks for $330 million.
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Networking equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc. added to its growing portfolio of security products on Monday, agreeing to buy Protego Networks Inc.
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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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Cisco Systems has announced its participation in the acquisition season currently underway by signing a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Protego Networks, Inc.
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As servers and storage start to merge into unified, virtualized systems, Cisco wants to do the same thing with the networks that connect them.On Monday, the company is set to unveil a datacenter networking platform that eventually could take the place of both the Ethernet switches that link servers as well as the Fibre Channel devices that form storage networks. The Nexus series is designed both to meet exploding demands for bandwidth and energy efficiency within data centers and to simplify the jobs of IT administrators. In the process, it could help give Cisco the central role it seeks in IT infrastructure.Cisco is already a leading player in datacenter networks with its&#160;Catalyst series Ethernet switches&#160;and its MDS storage network platform. Now it hopes to transcend those separate systems using a single, unified switching fabric and the emerging Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) standard. The platform it will use, called Nexus, will be a line of routing switches in chassis, rack-mounted and blade form. The first of these, the Nexus 7000 chassis, will be generally available in the second quarter. Prices will start at $75,000, but a typical configuration will cost about $200,000, according to Jayshree Ullal, senior vice president of Cisco&#39;s Data Center, Switching and Security Technology Group.Mark Drake is looking at the Nexus platform for future-proofing as his company, Health Management Associates, centralizes its data resources. The company runs about 60 hospitals, mostly in the Southeastern U.S. Health Management&#39;s current Catalyst switches are probably enough to handle connectivity needs in its data centers for the next two years, but it&#39;s hard to predict storage and processing requirements beyond that as he looks for the next generation, Drake said.&quot;I&#39;m looking at a little over ten years&#39; capacity,&quot; Drake said. The Nexus line is built to go far beyond the scale of the Catalysts, delivering more than 15Tbps. &quot;The capacity to grow is huge,&quot; he said.Another benefit Drake sees in the Nexus, which he has been told about but hasn&#39;t tested, is ease of management. Health Management is already trying to reduce IT staff costs by consolidating data centers from each hospital to a two main locations. Because the new platform combines storage and data switching along with security in a single switch and management interface, it could further simplify running those datacenters, he said.Initially, Cisco sees the Nexus switches at the core of datacenters that still use separate networks for processing and storage. But as FCoE emerges in storage systems, the Nexus could become the single connectivity platform, Ullal said. Its switching fabric is designed to be lossless, unlike a standard Ethernet system, which tolerates dropped packets, said Tom Edsall, senior vice president and CTO of the data center group. The platform also has built-in security features, including wire-speed encryption and authentication capability for each port.At the heart of the platform is a new, virtualized operating system, NX OS. As with server virtualization, NX OS can turn a Nexus switch into multiple logical switches running totally different processes, Ullal said . For example, one logical switch could handle storage and be managed by storage specialists, while the other links servers and is run by a different staff. A third could be a test platform. All would use a single switching fabric and set of redundant power supplies, which provides benefits in performance, economies of scale, and resiliency, she said. This virtualized architecture eventually will trickle down to other Cisco product lines, according to Ullal.Cisco also has automated some aspects of management with the Nexus line, drawing on best practices it learned partly from its customers, Edsall said. The system is designed to monitor and heal itself in many cases.The network&#39;s role in datacenters is growing as computing and storage are combined and shared, according to industry analysts. It&#39;s now the &quot;orchestrator&quot; of the datacenter, Zeus Kerravala of Yankee Group said. Cisco is the only vendor with both the networking and the computing experience to fulfill that role, he believes. But though many managers of datacenters want to see total virtualization of the datacenter, which could boost efficiency, they aren&#39;t yet ready for it.&quot;We&#39;re just entering the very early stages of the virtual datacenter,&quot; Kerravala said. &quot;This is probably at least two years away.&quot;Cisco is best positioned to build the core of datacenters because the network touches everything in it, according to Ullal, Edsall, and other executives.&quot;For Cisco, it&#39;s very critical that this platform be a launching pad to go further up the IT stack,&quot; said IDC&#39;s Cindy Borovick. However, taking control of datacenters won&#39;t be a walk in the park, she cautioned.&quot;Cisco&#39;s in a very strong position, but there are other very large suppliers that recognize how important the datacenter is and are willing to invest the R&amp;D dollars,&quot; Borovick said, citing IBM and Sun Microsystems. To Cisco&#39;s peril, datacenter administrators are more than willing to buy the best of many vendors rather than standardize on one, because they control the &quot;crown jewels&quot; of the enterprise, she said.
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Networking giant buys start-up P-Cube, a maker of software for controlling, monitoring and billing for IP services.
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Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO.O), the world's largest maker of equipment to direct traffic on the Internet, on Monday said it will buy privately held software developer P-Cube for about &#36;200 million in cash and options.
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Cisco Systems(R) (NASDAQ:CSCO) today announced it has made enhancements to its Internet Protocol Next-Generation Network (IP NGN) architecture to ease deployment of a wide range of business-focused and consumer-based services.
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Cisco Systems has finalized an agreement to purchase privately held BCN Systems, a provider of networking software design. Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco will pay approximately $34 million in cash for BCN. The price could increase by as much as $122 million if BCN meets certain development and product milestones. BCN's architecture will be incorporated across Cisco's broad routing portfolio and will support Cisco's delivery of next-generation data, voice, and video services over a converged network.
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Cisco Systems said it agreed to acquire privately held Airespace Inc. for around 450 million dollars in stock and assumed options in a move to strengthen its offerings of wireless, local area networking products.
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Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO.O: Quote, Profile, Research) , the world&#39;s largest maker of equipment to direct traffic on the Internet, on Monday said it will buy privately held software developer
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International Internet networking giant Cisco Systems, Inc. agreed Monday to acquire Herzliya-based P-Cube, Inc. for approximately $200 million in cash and options.
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(InfoWorld) - Cisco Systems is continuing to buy its way into social networking, acquiring some assets of the company that operates Tribe.net while letting the site remain independent. Cisco announced Monday it has bought selected assets of Utah Street Networks, a seven-person San Francisco company founded in 2003. It did not acquire Tribe.net, a social-networking site that has been overshadowed by the success of big names such as Friendster, Facebook, and News Corp.'s MySpace. Cisco did not reveal the terms of the deal, which has already been completed, in a statement Monday. With the purchase, Cisco gets a proprietary software infrastructure that Utah Street has used to create and maintain online communities on Tribe.net. The dominant networking vendor will integrate that software into its Cisco Media Solutions Group (CMSG), and certain Utah Street employees will join that team to continue software development, according to Cisco. Cisco started moving into content infrastructure last year with the formation of the CMSG, which made its first acquisition last month when itÂ bought social-networking software company Five Across. On Monday, Cisco announced that acquisition had been completed. The San Jose, California, company sees social networking as a key part of the way media companies and other enterprises will approach their customers. On Tribe.net, users can set up personal profiles, join interest groups, post blog entries and pictures, and review local businesses, among other things. Versions of the site exist for dozens of U.S. cities. Utah Street brings unspecified capabilities to Cisco that Five Across -- and even well-known social networking sites -- don't have, said Eric Chan, strategy and marketing director for CMSG. "This is also a company that has been going through the wars of running a social networking site over the past few years," Chan said. Among other things, that real-world experience taught the company lessons about how people use such a site, he said. Cisco is finished buying social-networking companies, at least for now, Chan said. CMSG's mission extends beyond that technology to a range of other tools for enterprises to make closer connections with their customers, he said. Most enterprises haven't yet started using social-networking technologies, but they could prove great tools for communication even within companies, said Yankee Group analyst Zeus Kerravala. Enterprise IT departments, which typically dictate what tools employees should use to communicate, should instead provide a variety of methods users understand and let them choose, Kerravala said. Cisco can pave the way for that change by combining several such tools in one package for enterprises to deploy. "I think it's very forward-looking by Cisco," Kerravala said. Demand for such consumer-style software will grow as today's young people enter the work force, he said. In fact, Kerravala thinks Cisco should go one step further into the future by buying Second Life creator Linden Research.
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Cisco Systems has announced that it will acquire privately held startup Protego Networks for $65 million. The move brings many possibilities to Cisco.