Cisco agree to acquire Viptela, a start-up specializing in software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN), for $610 million in cash and assumed equity awards. Equity investors in Viptela included Cisco, Redline Captial, Northgate Capital and Sequoia Capital.
Viptela, which is based in San Jose, California, developed a secure overlay fabric for SD-WAN, Cloud Onramp and Network-as-a-Service applications for enterprise clients.
The Viptela fabric offers separation of control, data, management and orchestration layers; integrated routing, security and policy controls; and full application awareness across all elements in the system. A key differentiator for Viptel is ingrained authentication, encryption, segmentation and access controls. Viptela has previously announced major deployments with Verizon, Singtel, NTTPC and others.
Cisco already offers its software-based Cisco Intelligent WAN (IWAN) and Meraki SD-WAN solutions. The company said the Viptela acquisition will enable it to accelerate the development of next generation SD-WAN solutions.
“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. These principles are what today’s customers demand,” said Scott Harrell, senior vice president of product management for the Cisco Enterprise Networking Group. “With Viptela and Cisco, we will be able to deliver a comprehensive portfolio of comprehensive on-premises, hybrid, and cloud-based SD-WAN solutions.”
The Viptela team will join the Enterprise Routing team within the Networking and Security Business led by senior vice president David Goeckeler.
https://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?type=press-release&articleId=1841607
- In January, Viptela named Praveen Akkiraju as its new CEO, replacing Amir Khan, co-founder and current CEO, who will continue playing an active role as President and board member. Mr. Akkiraju has served as CEO of VCE for the past four years, where he led the converged infrastructure provider to the No.1 market share position, while tripling revenues to $2.1B and achieving profitability. Prior to VCE, he spent more than 19 years at Cisco, including his last role as senior vice president & general manager of Cisco’s Enterprise Networking group.
“In just four years, Viptela has pioneered the SD-WAN market and is now the most widely deployed solution in the industry. We are thrilled that Praveen is joining us to accelerate the next phase of our growth,” said Amir Khan. “Praveen has built and led some of the fastest growing businesses in data center and enterprise networking. He is passionate about working with customers across the enterprise, service provider and SMB markets to enable their next generation WAN transformation.”
- Co-founders of Viptela include Amir Khan , who previously led the enterprise routing buisiness at Juniper and before that was director of product management at Cisco; and Khalid Raza, who was previously a distinguished engineer at Cisco.
Blueprint: What’s Wrong with the WAN?
by Khalid Raza, CTO, Viptela Today’s WANs are built on largely the same infrastructure as they were 10 years ago. Back then, demands by users and applications were more predictable, resulting in more expected traffic patterns and bandwidth requirements. And there was no cloud. And there was no virtualization. But things are different today. Delay-sensitive real-time applications such as VoIP and video are now enterprise…
