Cisco increases its network monitoring capabilities with a couple of acquisitions

In 2020, Cisco bought Thousandeyes, a network monitoring company that provides a wealth of data on the health of networks, something near and dear to Cisco, whose core business after all remains networking hardware.

As an extension of that three-year-old acquisition, the company announced a pair of startup acquisitions today, grabbing Accedian and SamKnows, a small U.K. startup. Both companies increase the amount of data available for Cisco to understand networking better, which should help increase the reach of the data the company already has with Thousandeyes.

Accedian, which the company announced it was buying last week, should help increase the capabilities of Thousandeyes with a solution focused specifically on the performance of cloud service providers. Writing in a blog post announcing the deals, Jonathan Davidson, EVP and general manager for Cisco Networking described the company as advancing Cisco’s knowledge in this area with tooling specifically designed to track and monitor cloud behavior.

“Now, our customers can see—at a microscopic level—across their IT and network infrastructure to deeply understand every user’s experience at every moment. Real-time applications like video conferencing and industrial IoT require low-latency connectivity where precise data is needed to detect network degradation,” Davidson wrote. This information should help Cisco internally with some of its own SaaS tooling, as well as helping customers access this data externally.

Accedian, which is based in Montreal, Canada, goes back a ways having been founded in 2004. It raised $31 million over the years, according to Crunchbase data.

The company also picked up SamKnows, a small U.K. broadband monitoring company. Both companies will join the Thousandeyes team at Cisco and help increase the amount of data the company has when it comes to monitoring and understanding network health more broadly.

It’s worth noting that the company also monitors the health of applications running on these networks with the application monitoring tool AppDynam.ics, which the company bought in 2017 for $3.7 billion the week it was to go public.