These Are Cisco’s 10 Acquisitions Since Last June

Cisco spent the last year covering its bases when it came to bolstering its collaboration, security, cloud, and application businesses through acquisitions. Here are the 10 deals that Cisco has inked year over year.

Shopping Spree

Cisco Systems has been busy at the negotiation table over the course of the last year. Since last June, the tech giant has announced its intent to acquire — or close on — deals for 10 companies to round out its robust portfolio. Three of those deals alone were just revealed last month.

It’s no secret that Cisco has been on a collaboration kick as a result of the global COVID-19 pandemic. The company has been putting its all into the Webex platform, which emerged as one of the most highly sought-after remote collaboration platforms for enterprise users once millions of employees began working from home. Cisco has, in fact, spent the last year adding and upgrading more than 800 features on Webex. Unsurprisingly, the company made four acquisitions since last July that involve improving the remote communication and virtual event experience, including scooping up a contact center-as-a-service specialist and a noise cancellation technology provider.

Cisco also stepped up its cloud and applications game by purchasing software that is boosting visibility and control for both end users and channel partners. At the same time, Cisco’s security business is one that has continuously posted solid, if not double-digit growth every quarter since the start of the pandemic. As such, the company revealed plans in May to add to its security repertoire, specifically for vulnerability management.

Here are the 10 Cisco acquisitions that the company has inked since last summer.

Kenna Security

Cisco’s May shopping spree kicked off with the company announcing its intent to purchase its San Jose, Calif.-based neighbor, Kenna Security, a vulnerability management software provider.

According to Cisco, Kenna’s technology will help customers more effectively prioritize vulnerabilities based on threat intelligence and business impact. The technology will make it easier for organizations to work cross-functionally to rapidly identify, prioritize and remediate cyber risk.

Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, and the acquisition is expected to close by late July. This is the first significant acquisition for Cisco’s robust security business since the company bought multi-factor authentication vendor Duo Security for $2.35 billion in October 2018.

Sedona Systems

Cisco in May announced plans to acquire Sedonasys Systems, also known as Sedona Systems, a maker of communications technologies, for its NetFusion platform, which will help Cisco with 5G network slicing, routed optical networking, and disaggregation.

According to the Israel and California-headquartered company, its NetFusion platform is a market leader for its Hierarchical Controller that enables multi-vendor, multi-domain automation, and software-defined networking. The Sedona NetFusion platform is the first to deliver complete network abstraction and control, which allows cloud service providers to manage their networks across domains, vendors, layers, and a myriad of different technologies, all as one single network.

The deal, said Cisco, will help the company build out its “Internet of the Future“ strategy. The two companies are not disclosing financial details of the transaction.

Socio Labs

For the third time in the same month, Cisco revealed plans to buy another company. This time, it was Socio Labs, an events technology startup based in Indiana.

Privately held Socio Labs offers an event technology platform that gives meeting organizers the tools to host in-person, virtual or hybrid events of any size and format, according to the Indianapolis-based company. Socio Labs said its customers include Google, Microsoft, PepsiCo and Hyundai. Cisco said the deal will boost Webex’s events capabilities around live streaming, sponsorship, participant networking and advanced analytics, and continuous attendee engagement before, during and after events.

Cisco said that the Socio Labs team will join the Webex Customer Experience team and the deal is expected to close during Cisco’s fourth fiscal quarter of 2021.

Slido

Cisco Collaboration, a business unit that has been on a roll with the addition of more than 800 new features to its popular Webex platform in the past year alone, became the proud owner of Slido, an audience interaction technology specialist, in May.

Bratislava, Slovakia-based Slido is giving Webex the ability to measure enthusiasm and let users and meeting host receive immediate feedback, understand audience sentiment, and engage more with fellow meeting participants in real-time. Cisco is also employing Slido’s technology to pop up anonymous questions, polls, and quizzes to boost Webex meeting participation and give all participants a voice, the company said.

The two companies did not reveal financial terms of the deal.

IMImobile PLC

IMImobile, a London-based contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS) firm, was scooped up by Cisco in February for approximately $730 million. The deal was aimed at creating a single technology platform to give businesses visibility into all customer interactions across the mobile app, Facebook messaging, marketing email or talking to a contact center agent, solving the problem of often-fragmented contact center experiences.

IMImobile’s technology orchestrates, automates, monitors and delivers improved customer interactions through its global and scalable cloud communications software and services. Cisco is using the technology to create an enhanced Cisco Contact Center platform that will bring together cloud contact center, artificial intelligence, experience management, collaboration and Communications Platform as-a-Service (CPaaS) in a single offering for customers and channel partners.

Dashbase, Inc.

Cisco kicked off the year in January by closing its acquisition of Dashbase, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based company known in the real-time communications space for its software that lets enterprises and service providers pull in log data from various communication environments.

Privately held Dashbase’s logs and events analytics are being integrated into integrated into the Cisco AppDynamics platform. Cisco said that. Cisco said that the software startup’s technology is strengthening visibility and unifying data across multiple domains.

The two companies did not disclose financial terms of the acquisition.

Banzai Cloud

Banzai Cloud, a company focused on end-to-end cloud-native application development, deployment, runtime and security workflows, caught the eye of Cisco in November, who scooped up the company for an undisclosed sum.

The three-year old startup was added to Cisco’s Emerging Technologies and Incubation group, the team incubating projects around cloud-native networking, security and edge computing environments for modern distributed applications.

Portshift

Cisco in October closed its acquisition of Portshift, an Israel-based startup that focuses on application security for cloud-native development environments, including Kubernetes. Cisco was especially interested in Portshift’s Kubernetes-native security platform that would help Cisco secure a bigger portion of the lifecycle of cloud applications and workloads. Portshift technology helps DevOps, security and operations teams continuously secure the containerized applications from the time they are created until they are ready to run, Cisco said.

While the two companies didn’t disclose financial details of the deal at the time, reports surfaced that Cisco spent around $100 million for privately held Portshift. Cisco did not confirm the buying price to CRN.

BabbleLabs, Inc.

BabbleLabs, a privately held known for its noise removal and speech enhancement technology, caught the eye of Cisco when it announced plans to buy the company in August. The deal later closed on Oct. 1.

Since then, Cisco has been hard at work baking BabbleLabs’ technology into its popular Webex platform. Specifically, Cisco has leveraged the native noise removal capability and is integrating BabbleLabs across its collaboration portfolio to deliver a best-in-class audio experience to Webex Meetings users - wherever they are and however they connect via the Webex application.

The two companies did not disclose financial details of the deal.

Modcam

On July 31 2020, Cisco purchased Modcam, a privately held, video analytics company based in Sweden for an undisclosed sum.

Cisco pursued the company to inject more intelligence into its Meraki smart camera portfolio. With the deal came Modcam’s highly talented engineers who brought with them expertise in machine learning, computer vision and cloud-managed cameras. Now with Modcam, Cisco Meraki MV smart camera capabilities include motion detection and machine learning-based object detection, all of which run at the edge, in-camera, according to Cisco.