Brocade has acquired the network visibility and analytics technology assets in an all cash transaction from privately held Vistapointe, which has offices in the US, Ireland, and India. The Vistapointe technologies are software-based, carrier-grade network visibility and analytics solutions for mobile operators embracing Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) architectures.
The acquisition enables Brocade to address the emerging opportunities and requirements of its service provider customers, especially global Mobile Network Operators (MNOs). Through enhanced network visibility and analytics, these MNOs will be better equipped to classify, visualize, manage, and secure subscriber data traffic to deliver a superior user experience through real-time insights gained from network activity.
These capabilities will be essential for MNOs rolling out 4G/LTE technology across the billions of mobile devices deployed worldwide, led primarily by data networking requirements. This also establishes a firm technology foundation for MNOs as they begin the migration path to 5G technology in the coming years. The expected revenue for data traffic over mobile handsets will exceed $358 billion (USD) by 2018, representing the single largest source of revenue for MNOs over the next six years, according to industry research firm Analysys Mason.
In addition to enhancing the Brocade NFV technology portfolio, the Vistapointe acquisition directly complements the existing Brocade MLX-based IP telemetry solution to provide MNOs with an end-to-end network intelligence solution, from the network packet broker to analytics applications. With this transaction, the Vistapointe technologies are being incorporated into a new Network Visibility and Analytics group reporting into Jason Nolet, Vice President of the Switching, Routing, and Analytics products group, Brocade.
"With the massive growth in connected devices and the dominance of data in mobile networks, network visibility and analytics will be more important than ever. And, as mobile operators continue the aggressive pace at which they intend to adopt software networking solutions, they will benefit from complementary, NFV-based analytics tools to improve subscriber quality of experience and security while also dramatically reducing costs," Nolet said. "The Vistapointe team has recognized the disruptive opportunity of leveraging NFV-based solutions for analytics, and we believe its technology is at the forefront of this space and perfectly aligned to the needs of mobile operators."
Similar to the disruption NFV is creating at the infrastructure layer, the Vistapointe solutions virtualize analytic tools from the underlying custom hardware probes to deliver network visibility and analytics in a software form factor. The result is a solution that can leverage existing industry-standard x86 compute platforms and hypervisor technology to deliver real-time granular network visibility to mobile operators using software-centric networking strategies. The Vistapointe solutions enable customers to match their software infrastructure strategies with software-based intelligence solutions for maximum agility at a cost far lower than incumbent, hardware-based solutions.
"The Vistapointe acquisition affirms our commitment to SDN and NFV as a means to disrupt the status quo of the networking industry," said Ken Cheng, CTO and Vice President of Corporate Development, Brocade. "We will continue to execute against a focused strategy that leverages M&A, strategic partnerships, open source communities, and organic innovation to deliver next-generation networking solutions that are open, virtual, and simple."
As part of the transaction, Vistapointe CEO, Ravi Medikonda, has joined Brocade as Vice President of the Network Visibility and Analytics product group. Furthermore, Brocade has hired the Vistapointe development team, and they will report into Medikonda as part of the new business unit.
The Latest
Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...
In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ...
Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...
Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...
Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...
The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...
The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...
In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...
AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.
The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...