Cisco To Acquire Cariden For $141 Million

Cisco (CSCO) announced its intent to acquire privately held Cariden Technologies for $141 million. Sunnyvale based Cariden is a supplier of network planning, design and traffic management solutions for telecom service providers.

Cariden will be integrated into Cisco's Service Provider Networking Group. Cariden's products and technology will advance Cisco's nLight technology for IP and optical convergence and supports the company's Open Network Environment (ONE) strategy by providing sophisticated wide area networking orchestration capabilities. Cariden’s industry-leading capacity planning and management tools for IP/MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) networks, which have been deployed by many of the world’s leading fixed and mobile network operators.

"The Cariden acquisition reinforces Cisco's commitment to offering service providers the technologies they need to optimize and monetize their networks, and ultimately grow their businesses," said Surya Panditi, senior vice president and general manager, Cisco's Service Provider Networking Group. "Given the widespread convergence of IP and optical networks, Cariden's technology will help carriers more efficiently manage bandwidth, network traffic and intelligence. This acquisition signals the next phase in Cisco's packet and optical convergence strategy and further strengthens our ability to lead this market transition in networking."

Cariden's MATE platform provides easily maintained traffic and topology models, with fast and reliable mechanisms to engineer network-wide traffic and to centralize provisioning of configuration changes.  Cariden also recently released its vision for software defined networking (SDN), positioning Network Services OS (NS-OS) as the foundation for a proven approach to SDN requirements.

Upon the close of the acquisition, Cariden employees will report to Shailesh Shukla, vice president and general manager of the company’s Software and Applications Group. Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco will pay approximately $141 million in cash and retention-based incentives in exchange for all shares of Cariden.