Riverbed Technology agreed to acquire OPNET for $43 per share in cash and stock, representing an equity value of $1 billion and an enterprise value of $921 million.
The deal will combine Riverbed’s Cascade network performance management (NPM) business with OPNET’s expertise in application performance management (APM) market. The combination of Cascade and OPNET will have over $250 million in annualized revenue in a market that the companies characterize as a multi-billion dollar opportunity.
Riverbed and OPNET said their joint offering will provide “unparalleled visibility and insight into application and network performance.”
“The addition of OPNET establishes Riverbed as the clear leader in the high-growth and converging application and network performance management markets,” said Jerry Kennelly, Chairman and CEO at Riverbed. “This acquisition also transforms Riverbed into a billion dollar revenue company.”
“Riverbed and OPNET have natural synergies,” said Marc Cohen, OPNET’s Chairman and CEO. “Riverbed’s leadership in accelerating business technology combined with OPNET’s industry-leading suite of APM products provides customers with a single solution for monitoring, troubleshooting and actually fixing the application and network performance problems challenging them today.”
- OPNET is led by Marc Cohen (CEO) and Alain Cohen (CTO). The company was founded in 1986 and is based in Bethesda, Maryland.
- Earlier in October, Riverbed announced enhancements to its Cascade application-aware network performance management (NPM) solution with new capabilities for virtualized desktop infrastructure (VDI), server virtualization, and fully virtualized data centers using VXLAN software-defined networks (SDNs). The upcoming Cascade 10.0, which will be released in Q4, is targeting these virtualization features for deployment by service providers as well as in public, private, and hybrid clouds. The company said Cascade 10.0 will help network operators to pinpoint, understand, and troubleshoot performance issues within these virtualized environments. This includes:
- For virtualized desktop infrastructure (VDI), Cascade 10.0 monitoring supports the most popular VDI protocols, providing visibility for VMware View (PCoIP protocol) and the Common Internet File Systems (CIFS) protocol.
- For monitoring VXLAN SDNs, Cascade 10.0 provides visibility into the UDP-encapsulated traffic and virtual tunnel endpoints. This helps control and understand VXLAN virtual overlay network performance.
- Cascade 10.0 adds the ability to monitor and troubleshoot software-defined data centers (SDDC) and the physical network.
- Riverbed is also introducing two new virtual editions of its Cascade product family that enable managed service providers (MSPs) to deliver application-aware network performance management (NPM) as a service to their small-to-medium-sized and enterprise customers. Riverbed said its new Cascade Profiler Virtual Edition and Cascade Gateway Virtual Edition, in addition to the existing Cascade Shark Virtual Edition, provide a completely virtualized NPM solution portfolio that allows MSPs to deliver continued value in a virtualized world with the next-generation of performance management.
