Cisco have announced that they have completed Viptela’s acquisition, with a press-release that indicates this fits within their intent-based networking strategy announced last week. As predicted, the value of the deal was $610mn.
As is becoming common with Cisco, there is also a blog post providing additional information on the acquisition Viptela . This makes interesting reading, particularly the section on the vision for Cisco’s SD-WAN services. I quote:
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For customers and partners that require cloud-first SD-WAN solutions with advanced routing, complex topologies, or granular segmentation capabilities, Cisco’s SD-WAN solution based on Viptela will be the preferred solution.
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For customers looking for unified threat management (UTM) solutions with SD-WAN functionality or are existing Cisco Meraki customers looking to expand to SD-WAN then Cisco Meraki is the recommended solution.
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For customers of Cisco’s IWAN solution, we will continue to invest in the roadmap of IWAN and support customers on Cisco’s IWAN solution. As new unified offers are made available with Viptela’s technology incorporated in the ISR and ASRs, customers will be able to migrate to the new unified solution as needed or desired.
So it looks as if IWAN will gradually be phased into the Viptela offering, and the entry-level SMB SD-WAN users directed towards Meraki.