Cisco has padded its SD-WAN portfolio with fellow player Viptela for $610 million.

The deal will be a homecoming for Viptela’s top execs as current CEO Praveen Akkiraju is a former Cisco and Dell EMC. Co-founders of Viptela Amir Khan and Khalid Raza were engineers at Cisco.

“Cisco has been providing SD-WAN technology and services to customers for several years; the Cisco IWAN solution delivers an on-premises SD-WAN solution for customers needing advanced routing features and other advanced network services, and Cisco Meraki provides a cloud-based solution for customers needing maximum simplicity and unified threat management functionality in their SD-WAN solution. Acquiring Viptela will enable us to expand our portfolio, with increased functionality delivered through the cloud,” wrote Rob Salvagno Vice President of Corporate Business Development at Cisco wrote in a blog post on the deal.

With Viptela, Cisco can offer customers more choice in their enterprise branch offices and WAN deployments, with a SD-WAN solution that is easy to deploy and simple to manage. “Together, Cisco and Viptela will be able to deliver next generation SD-WAN solutions to best serve all size and scale of customer needs, while accelerating Cisco’s transition to a recurring, software-based business model. Viptela will join the Enterprise Routing team within Cisco’s Networking and Security Group led by Senior Vice President and General Manager David Goeckeler,” Salvagno wrote.

Signed to be CEO this past January Akkiraju said at the time: “2017 will be the year of SD-WAN and we expect rapid adoption of the technology going forward. We are in an amazing time of enterprise transformation where traditional applications are being deconstructed and being rebuilt in the cloud. Traditional networks are amid the same kind of disruption and Viptela can lead that transformation.”

One of the greatest challenges going forward is connecting users at the edge of the network, securely with the cloud, Akkiraju said. There is also a need to support a diversity of devices needing connectivity – everything from MPLS to LTE—to get to cloud services.

Akkiraju noted that Viptela hosts 90% of its software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) customers in Amazon Web Services (AWS). bron: networkworld.com