Cisco is acquiring service assurance firm Accedian

US networking giant Cisco is set to strengthen its service assurance offering with the acquisition of Canadian network optimisation specialist Accedian.

For some reason the announcement has been made via a Cisco blog, rather than the more conventional press release. It framed the move as ‘accelerating high performance service assurance’. The stated rationale is fairly superficial, merely stressing that it’s important to make digital experiences as robust as possible and that the acquisition will augment the Cisco Networking Cloud.

“Accedian was born in the heart of the world’s largest and most complex networks,” said Dion Joannou, CEO of Accedian. “When we were acquired by Bridge Growth Partners, a leading technology investment firm, in 2017 we transformed the company, accelerated its growth, and evolved to a SaaS-first service assurance platform.

“Microseconds matter to customers and customer experience, and precise, granular performance visibility is a foundational requirement for closed-loop automation, agile telco cloud environments, and latency-sensitive 5G services. We look forward to bringing our critical capabilities to a wider set of solutions within Cisco’s Networking portfolio and taking the next step in the partnership we have built with Cisco and our joint customers over the last years.”

Cisco didn’t bother with a canned quote because the blog is written by Kevin Wollenweber, the GM of its data center and provider connectivity organization. “As Dion and I have worked together over the past two years, I have come to know the Accedian team and their dedication to solving customer problems, their deep technical understanding of this market, and their great capacity to innovate to solve some of the biggest assurance challenges,” he blogged.

Accedian will be incorporated into Wollenweber’s team when the move completes. Cisco expects that to happen during the first quarter of its FY 2024 which, for reasons best known to Cisco’s accountants, seems to equate to August-October of this year. As Joannou said, Accedian is owned by a private equity firm so, while that means we don’t know what Cisco is paying, there should be few, if any, regulatory hurdles to overcome.

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