Cisco Systems is acquiring Viptela, an SD-WAN specialist, for $610 million in cash and assumed equity awards, Cisco just confirmed.
Cisco's interest in the software-defined wide area networking market is easily explained. Worldwide SD-WAN spending is expected to reach $9.06 billion by 2021, up from $738.9 million in 2016, according to Markets and Markets. That’s a compound annual growth rate of 65.11 percent, the researcher says.
Multiple factors are driving SD-WAN demand. Chief among them: The use of mobile devices — smartphones, notebooks, and tablets — to access corporate networks. And the ability for network operators to save huge capital and operational expenditures, Markets and Markets says. Moreover, SD-WAN are affordable in comparison to traditional networking connections, the researcher asserts.
Amid all that pent-up demand, SD-WANs dominated the recent Channel Partners Conference and Expo in Las Vegas. The conversation will continue at this week's NFV World Congress Expo in San Jose. Vpitela CTO and Co-founder Khalid Raza, a former Distinguished Engineer at Cisco, is set to address the SD-WAN conversation at the show. And now he's set to rejoin Viptela.
