Cisco Beefs Up Network Analytics With Truviso Purchase

Cisco Systems has made a potentially important strategic play with its decision to purchase privately-held Truviso.

The move will allow Cisco to offer businesses greater capabilities in monitoring and analysing the rapidly growing amount of data traffic that is passing over their networking infrastructures.

Traffic Management

Cisco officials on 3 May announced their intent on buying Truviso, a seven-year-old company that builds software that executives say give customers the ability to analyse network data continuously and in real time.

Financial terms of the deal were not announced, and Cisco expects to close the deal by July.

Cisco will incorporate Truviso’s technology into its Cisco Prime technology, which enables businesses to gather and analyse network traffic. Truviso’s real-time analysis technology will enable users to get an immediate picture of their networks.

“With the growth of end-user devices and applications and in turn the proliferation of large amounts of network data, service provider and enterprise customers are looking for ways to better understand usage and differentiate their service offerings,” Hilton Romanski, vice president and head of corporate business development at Cisco, said in a 3 May post on the company’s blog. “Truviso’s continuous query technology allows companies to get detailed information and visibility of network use and services in real-time, with its analyze-first, store-later capability.”

Cisco executives for more than a year have been talking about the growing amount of traffic that will be flooding networks worldwide, thanks in large part to the rapid rise in the use of Internet-connected devices like smartphones, tablets, laptops and appliances. A year ago, Cisco officials in their annual Visual Networking Index Forecast said that by 2015, there will be almost 15 billion network-connected devices in the world, with global Internet traffic quadrupling to 966 exabytes per year.

Both service providers and end businesses are pushing for technologies that can give them a better and more instantaneous understanding of what’s happening in their networks.

“Customers want to be able to tap into and better analyse the enormous volume of data traversing their networks to identify ways to enhance services and generate new revenue opportunities,” Jamie Lerner, vice president and general manager of Cisco Network Management Technology Group, said in a statement.  “Embedding Truviso’s real time business intelligence into the network will help customers unlock these capabilities at the speed of the network.”

Truviso’s employees will be integrated into the Cisco Network Management Technology Group.

Acquisition Moves

Cisco has been aggressive over the years in buying companies to expand the reach of its portfolio beyond switches and routers.

Company executives have identified five key “pillars” that form the foundation of what they’re doing going forward – core networking, data centre, virtualisation, collaboration, and video. This year, among the companies Cisco has bought has been NDS Group (video software), ClearAccess (network management) and Lightwire (optical networking).

Cisco’s Romanski said Truviso is part of a larger acquisition strategy for the company.

“As we continue to use all of Cisco’s tools to drive innovation, acquisitions such as Truviso will help bring top talent, new technology, and business models into Cisco,” he wrote. “M&A remains a key part of our build, buy, and partner innovation framework and supports our strategy of providing best-in-class solutions for our customers. The Truviso acquisition is well-aligned to our strategic goals of building software platforms and driving business and technology architectures.”

Truviso’s Continuous Analytics platform includes the TruSQL Engine stream relational processing technology, High Cardinality Optimisation Module for managing unique value – such as unique visitors and unique pages – and TruView reporting and visualisation dashboards.