Networking equipment company Cisco Systems announced it will buy San Francisco-based Meraki for $1.2 billion in an effort to expand its ability to let customers compute in the cloud.
A cloud networking company with offices in New York, London and Mexico, Meraki was founded in 2006 by MIT graduates with funding from Sequoia Capital and Google. Meraki offers midmarket customers on-premise networking solutions that can be centrally managed from the cloud.
According to the acquisition deal, Cisco will pay approximately $1.2 billion in cash and retention-based incentives to acquire the entire business and operations of Meraki. The acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of Cisco's fiscal year 2013.
"The acquisition of Meraki enables Cisco to make simple, secure, cloud managed networks available to our global customer base of mid-sized businesses and enterprises. These companies have the same IT needs as larger organizations, but without the resources to integrate complex IT solutions," Rob Soderbery, senior vice president, Cisco Enterprise Networking Group, said in a statement.
Meraki technology offers customers Wi-Fi, switching, security and mobile device management centrally managed from the cloud. It solutions support BYOD, guest networking, application control, WAN optimization, application firewall and other advanced networking services.
"Meraki's solution was built from the ground up optimized for cloud, with tremendous scale, and is already in use by thousands of customers to manage hundreds of thousands of devices," Soderbery said.
Cisco has been involved in active acquisitions with eight acquisitions since February including a $130 million deal to buy Cloupia, a back-end cloud services provider.
