Cisco is acquiring Accedian in a move to boost the 5G network assurance and observability capabilities of its Networking Cloud efforts.

Kevin Wollenweber, SVP and GM for data center and provider connectivity at Cisco, noted in a blog post that the acquisition will allow Cisco to link Accedian’s network performance and user experience monitoring services into Cisco's ThousandEyes network assurance platform. This is targeted at helping service providers better manage latency-dependent services running across 5G networks.

“Accedian greatly strengthens Cisco’s approach to assurance, helping to enable agility, efficiency and the scale that service providers need to drive success,” Wollenweber wrote. “Accedian’s service assurance portfolio of microsecond-level sensors and the powerful Skylight Analytics platform coupled with Cisco’s robust portfolio will enable Cisco to bring transformational solutions to our service provider customers.”

Gartner labeled Accedian as a “niche player” in the network performance monitoring and diagnostic space, while GigaOm placed the vendor in the “challengers” category of its network observability rankings. Wollenweber noted Accedian has deals with 75% of the world’s top telecom service providers.

One of Accedian’s key products has been its Skylight platform, which is a virtualized network services platform that provides service activation testing, network fault isolation, bandwidth monitoring and service assurance functions. It also applies NFV monitoring capabilities at various locations including on-premises, at a central location or at the network core.

Cisco had previously partnered with Accedian to provide Zain Kuwait with automated network visibility services. This included Cisco’s Crosswork Network Automation platform and Accedian’s Skylight service.

Accedian earlier this year struck a deal with VMware to integrate its Skylight platform with VMware’s Telco Cloud Platform. The validated integration allows communications service providers (CSPs) to automatically onboard, catalog and deploy containerized testing and monitoring functions for new 5G service deployments.

Wollenweber wrote that Cisco would continue to honor all of Accedian’s existing customer agreements.

Financial terms of the deal were not released, though Wollenweber did note the deal is expected to close during the first quarter of Cisco’s 2024 fiscal year, which concludes at the end of this October. The Accedian team will be integrated into Cisco’s current Data Center and Provider Connectivity organization within Cisco Networking.

Cisco is acquiring Accedian from private equity firm Bridge Growth Partners, which acquired a majority stake in Accedian in mid-2017. Reports at that time indicated that investment was in excess of $100 million.

The Accedian deal follows on Cisco’s recent update to its ThousandEyes and AppDynamics full-stack observability platforms. That update included the use of the open-source OpenTelemetry project to provide bidirectional data to both AppDynamics and ThousandEyes to help AppOps and NetOps teams.

“This enhancement to the customer digital experience–monitoring use case is automatically embedded to both Cisco AppDynamics and Cisco ThousandEyes,” Carlos Pereira, Cisco fellow and chief architect of strategy, applications, emerging technologies and incubation, told SDxCentral. “It will help customers to get a complete picture of their application health, allowing them to make better-informed decisions and resolve issues quicker — ultimately leading to better user experience and improved business outcomes.”

The OpenTelemetry project was formed in 2020 as a merger of the OpenCensus and OpenTracing open-source projects. OpenTelemetry is currently a hosted project at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Cisco has also been more closely tying its observability services into its growing security focus.

The vendor earlier this year rolled out its Business Risk Observability risk scoring service, which combines its Kenna Risk Meter score distribution with AppDynamics’ business transitions monitoring and insights. The service also has API and application security capabilities based on Cisco’s Portshift acquisition and supported by its Talos team’s threat intelligence.

Tom Gillis, SVP and GM of Cisco’s security business group, told SDxCentral in an earlier interview the observability and security capability integration is “a perfect example” of Cisco’s security business leveraging components from across the company.