Cisco to Buy Meraki for $1.2 Billion

Monday, November 19, 2012

Cisco to Buy Meraki for $1.2 Billion

Cisco Systems said on Sunday that it had agreed to buy Meraki for about $1.2 billion, as Cisco continues to bolster its cloud computing services.

Cisco to Buy Meraki for $1.2 Billion

By buying Meraki, a privately held company whose investors include Google and Sequoia Partners, Cisco will add products that allow networks to be controlled through the Internet.

This is the latest example of a technology company seeking to harness the popularity of cloud computing, which uses remote networks of computers to provide a host of services.

Meraki, which was founded in 2006 by graduate students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, focuses on midsize companies that otherwise could not afford to run their own networking and security services.

“These companies have the same I.T. needs as larger organizations, but without the resources to integrate complex I.T. solutions,” Robert Soderbery, a senior vice president in Cisco’s enterprise networking group, said in a statement. “Meraki’s solution was built from the ground up optimized for cloud, with tremendous scale, and is already in use by thousands of customers to manage hundreds of thousands of devices.”

Cisco has been a particularly active buyer this year, having announced eight acquisitions since February. The previous acquisition was a $130 million deal last week for Cloupia, a provider of cloud services technology.

Meraki, based in San Francisco, will become part of a new cloud networking group within Cisco.

The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of Cisco’s 2013 fiscal year.

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