Meraki, a privately held networking company founded by researchers from MIT, has just been acquired by Cisco for an estimated US$1.2bn.
Cisco says the intention is to meet market demand for more cloud and software-centric solutions for managing networks.
Meraki technology offers customers Wi-Fi, switching, security and mobile device management centrally managed from the cloud. Meraki solutions support BYOD, guest networking, application control, WAN optimization, application firewall and other advanced networking services.
Cloud-based network management
“The acquisition of Meraki enables Cisco to make simple, secure, cloud managed networks available to our global customer base of mid-sized businesses and enterprises,” said Rob Soderbery, senior vice president, Cisco Enterprise Networking Group.
“These companies have the same IT needs as larger organizations, but without the resources to integrate complex IT solutions.
“Meraki’s solution was built from the ground up optimized for cloud, with tremendous scale, and is already in use by thousands of customers to manage hundreds of thousands of devices,” Soderbery said.
Meraki was founded by members of MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science. Meraki combines a high-velocity software development methodology with a tightly linked inside sales and channel model that will form the new Cloud Networking Group at Cisco..
Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco will pay approximately $1.2 billion in cash and retention-based incentives to acquire the entire business and operations of Meraki. The acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of Cisco’s fiscal year 2013.
