Arik Hesseldahl

Recent Posts by Arik Hesseldahl

Cisco Keeps Up Acquisition Pace With $141 Million Cariden Buy

Networking giant Cisco Systems said this morning that it will buy Cariden, a maker of software used in the planning, design and engineering of networks. Cisco will pay about $141 million for the privately held company, and the deal will close early next year.

It’s Cisco’s third deal this month. On Nov. 18, it offered $1.2 billion for Wi-Fi concern Meraki, and then followed it up with a $125 million deal for Cloupia.

Cariden has been around since 2001, and specializes in helping service providers optimize the operations of their networks. Customers include Verizon, Deutsche Telecom, SingTel and Swisscom, among others.

Brian Marshall, an analyst with ISI, issued some quick comments on the deal. He says that software for managing networks is going to play an increasingly important role as companies like Cisco start making active moves in the area of software-defined networking. SDN is what all the cool-kid networking companies are into these days, and it basically means that networks can be created on an ad hoc basis almost as easily as virtual machines can be spun up in a data center. Cariden, it turns out, has done some fundamental work on the SDN, and over the summer announced a blueprint for doing SDN-based network infrastructure.

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