NetScout Systems has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire the Communications business of Danaher Corporation, comprising Tektronix Communications, Arbor Networks, and certain parts of Fluke Networks.
Under the terms of the transaction, Danaher shareholders will receive approximately 62.5 million shares of NetScout common stock, which values the transaction at $2.6 billion based on NetScout’s closing price of $41.91 on October 10, 2014.
The transaction will increase NetScout’s scale and broaden its customer base in both the service provider and enterprise markets, while accelerating NetScout’s entry into the Cyber Intelligence market.
On a non-GAAP basis, the combined company is expected to have revenue exceeding $1.2 billion and the transaction is expected be accretive in the first year of combined operation.
The transaction is expected to close in the first half of NetScout’s fiscal year 2016.
"This combination represents another important step, and a major milestone, towards accelerating our ability to compete on a larger and more global scale in the broader IT management and Cyber Intelligence space, to fully implement our NetScout 3.0 strategy, and to maximize our potential in our total addressable market," stated Anil Singhal, co-founder, President and CEO of NetScout.
“NetScout’s high-performance monitoring technology combined with our premier troubleshooting, cyber security and engineering solutions will create the most comprehensive suite of best-in-class solutions in the industry today,” said James A. Lico, Danaher’s EVP. “The combined company will offer even greater breadth and depth across both carrier and enterprise networks, expanding opportunities for innovation and growth while improving our customers’ overall experience with comprehensive software-based solutions.”
Upon completion of the transaction, Lico will join NetScout’s Board of Directors, increasing the total number of directors to eight. NetScout will continue to be led by Singhal as president, CEO and chairman, along with the rest of his executive team.
Singhal concluded, “This business combination will expand NetScout’s global reach and help broaden our presence with customers in both the service provider and enterprise markets. In addition, it will jump-start our planned entry into the Cyber Intelligence market, particularly within the advanced persistent threat area. I am extremely excited about our potential to continue creating even more value for our customers, shareholders and employees. I also look forward to having Jim Lico, an experienced executive with tremendous insight into Danaher’s Communications business, join our Board.”
This transaction will bring together two long-respected leaders in the network and applications performance management and security sectors to create a premier provider of mission-critical solutions that can help customers drive compelling ROI on their IT investments, and mitigate the considerable business and operational risks associated with network and application downtime, service degradation, compliance lapses and security issues.
Danaher’s Communications business generated revenue (unaudited) of approximately $836 million for the year ended December 31, 2013. Danaher’s Communications business, which has over 2,000 employees worldwide, includes:
· Tektronix Communications, based in Plano, Texas, which provides a comprehensive set of assurance, intelligence and test solutions and services support for a range of architectures and applications such as LTE, HSPA, 3G, IMS, mobile broadband, VoIP, video and triple play. Also included are VSS Monitoring and Newfield Wireless.
· Arbor Networks, based in Burlington, Massachusetts, which provides solutions that help secure the world’s largest enterprise and service provider networks from DDoS attacks and advanced threats.
· Fluke Networks, based in Everett, Washington, which delivers network monitoring solutions that speed the deployment and improve the performance of networks and applications. The data cabling tools business and carrier service provider (CSP) tools business within Fluke Networks are not included this transaction.
NetScout, with over 1,000 employees, has a proven track record of successful acquisition integration, highlighted by the retention of key talent, strong collaboration across various technical areas, numerous technical accolades and notable success in driving customer adoption of new and enhanced products that resulted from these acquisitions.
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 ...