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Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire Viptela

Cisco announced intent to acquire Viptela, a privately held software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) company based in San Jose.

Viptela will expand Cisco's SD-WAN portfolio with increased functionality and simplicity delivered through the cloud.

"Viptela's technology is cloud-first, with a focus on simplicity and ease of deployment while simultaneously providing a rich set of capabilities and scale. These principles are what today's customers demand," said Scott Harrell, SVP of Product Management for the Cisco Enterprise Networking Group. "With Viptela and Cisco, we will be able to deliver a comprehensive portfolio of comprehensive on-premises, hybrid, and cloud-based SD-WAN solutions."

With this announcement, Cisco will be able to accelerate the path to developing next generation SD-WAN solutions, by combining Viptela's cloud first network management, orchestration and overlay technologies with industry-leading routing platforms, services, and SD-WAN capabilities from Cisco. Cisco is committed to Viptela's product offering and architecture as well as existing Cisco Intelligent WAN (IWAN) and Meraki SD-WAN solutions. The acquisition of Viptela also supports Cisco's strategic transition toward software-centric solutions that deliver predictable, recurring revenue.

The Viptela team will join the Enterprise Routing team within the Networking and Security Business led by SVP David Goeckeler. After the acquisition closes, Viptela and Cisco engineering teams will be working closely together to enhance Cisco's SD-WAN offering and ensure continued support for our customers.

Cisco will acquire Viptela for $610 million in cash and assumed equity awards. The acquisition is expected to close in the second half of calendar 2017, after having completed all of the customary closing conditions and regulatory review.

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Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire Viptela

Cisco announced intent to acquire Viptela, a privately held software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) company based in San Jose.

Viptela will expand Cisco's SD-WAN portfolio with increased functionality and simplicity delivered through the cloud.

"Viptela's technology is cloud-first, with a focus on simplicity and ease of deployment while simultaneously providing a rich set of capabilities and scale. These principles are what today's customers demand," said Scott Harrell, SVP of Product Management for the Cisco Enterprise Networking Group. "With Viptela and Cisco, we will be able to deliver a comprehensive portfolio of comprehensive on-premises, hybrid, and cloud-based SD-WAN solutions."

With this announcement, Cisco will be able to accelerate the path to developing next generation SD-WAN solutions, by combining Viptela's cloud first network management, orchestration and overlay technologies with industry-leading routing platforms, services, and SD-WAN capabilities from Cisco. Cisco is committed to Viptela's product offering and architecture as well as existing Cisco Intelligent WAN (IWAN) and Meraki SD-WAN solutions. The acquisition of Viptela also supports Cisco's strategic transition toward software-centric solutions that deliver predictable, recurring revenue.

The Viptela team will join the Enterprise Routing team within the Networking and Security Business led by SVP David Goeckeler. After the acquisition closes, Viptela and Cisco engineering teams will be working closely together to enhance Cisco's SD-WAN offering and ensure continued support for our customers.

Cisco will acquire Viptela for $610 million in cash and assumed equity awards. The acquisition is expected to close in the second half of calendar 2017, after having completed all of the customary closing conditions and regulatory review.

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In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

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 ...

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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 ...

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