Networking giant Cisco Systems Inc. today announced plans to acquire San Francisco-based network intelligence startup ThousandEyes Inc. for an undisclosed amount.

Under the deal, ThousandEyes’ technology will be used across Cisco’s core Enterprise Networking and Cloud services as well as its AppDynamics services. Co-founder and Chief Executive Mohit Lad (pictured) will become general manager of ThousandEyes, under Cisco’s newly formed Networking Services business unit, and co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Ricardo Oliveira will continue to manage product vision and innovation strategy, Cisco said.

ThousandEyes had raised $110.7 million, including a $50 million Series D round in February of last year. Pitchbook had pegged its valuation at $670 million last year. A Bloomberg source said the purchase price is about $1 billion.

Todd Nightingale, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Enterprise Networking and Cloud, said on a press and analyst call that the deal was in the works for two to three months, though the companies had met many times in various sales channels because they share a number of customers.

ThousandEyes operates a cloud platform to help companies track how their network traffic travels around the world, using specialized software sensors, or agents, to gather information about the underlying infrastructure.

The platform combines data from various sources to create a map of the network paths that a company’s traffic flows through, helping IT teams pinpoint precisely where data is stuck when there’s a connectivity issue. ThousandEyes says it can also help companies identify potential weak points in their networks and make more informed decisions on infrastructure investments.

The company had listed 20 of the world’s 25 largest software-as-as-a-service providers and six of the top seven banks in the U.S. as customers, including Microsoft Corp., Slack Inc. and Lyft Inc. Cisco noted that its services had become especially critical during the COVID-19 pandemic given greater use of cloud services in far-flung locations as stay-at-home restrictions went into effect.

“The combination of Cisco and ThousandEyes will enable deeper and broader visibility to pinpoint deficiencies and improve the network and application performance across all networks,” Nightingale said in a statement. “This will give customers end-to-end visibility when accessing cloud applications, and Internet Intelligence will improve networking reliability and the overall application experience.”

Nightingale added on the call that Cisco plans to integrate ThousandEyes technology across many and potentially all of Cisco’s offerings, including possibly its Webex videoconferencing service, for example. And in a blog post, referring to Cisco’s Talos threat intelligence group, he added that “more than anything, ThousandEyes is to the network what Talos is to security.”

Indeed, Dave Vellante, chief analyst at SiliconANGLE sister market research firm Wikibon, said the move represents Cisco “doubling down on security,” one of the company’s bright spots.

Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research, told SiliconANGLE that this is an “outstanding acquisition” for Cisco.

“With the shift to the cloud, work from home, mobile, et cetera, it’s fair to say the internet is as big a part of a corporate network as private networks are,” he said. “The internet has historically been a big blind spot for customers. Now with ThousandEyes, Cisco can bring that rich set of internet knowledge and combine it with the data it generates with its own equipment.”

Moreover, Kerravala added, “This is a big step into removing the delineation between private and public networks. There’s one network and the experience from the cloud to the company network to the device needs to be monitored.”

Lad talked about his company’s read on the market, as well as its new Internet Insights service that apparently interested Cisco, in a conversation (below) last November on SiliconANGLE Media’s video studio theCUBE.

“Internet Insights provides a macro view of global internet outages that extends far beyond what monitoring by individual organizations can provide. “That is giving you the power to look at the internet more holistically,” Lad said. “It’s the first time that somebody can actually see the internet, see all the connections and what is going on between major service providers and feel like you completely own the environment.”

Photo: SiliconANGLE