Cisco to acquire cloud company Meraki for $1.2bn

Meraki's simplified network management proves popular with customers - and its biggest rival

Networking hardware giant Cisco is to acquire privately held Meraki for $1.2bn (£755m).

Meraki, which was founded in 2006 and has offices in New York, London and Mexico, offers mid-market customers easy-to-deploy on-premise networking hardware, which can be centrally managed "in the cloud". Hardware can be easily viewed, superimposed on maps, to enable administrators to see exactly how the network under management is being used, including a breakdown of traffic at various different points.

The acquisition of Meraki will expand Cisco's Unified Access platform enabling it to offer more simplified network management, and to help customers better manage their mobile workforces. It will also help unite companies' wired and wireless networks, policy and management into one integrated network infrastructure, and generate new revenue streams for partners, according to Cisco.

"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," said Rob Soderbery, senior vice president, Cisco Enterprise Networking Group.

"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."

Meraki's technology offers customers Wi-Fi, switching, security and mobile device management centrally managed from its service accessed over the internet. It also supports bring your own device (BYOD), guest networking, application control, wide-area network optimisation, application firewall and other advanced networking services.