US vendor giant Cisco plans to bolster network assurance capabilities across its portfolio with a deal to buy privately-held Accedian, which counts 75 of the top 100 telecom service providers among its customers.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Cisco expects to close it in fiscal 2024, which runs to end-July 2024.

The vendors have worked together over the past two years as part of the Cisco SolutionsPlus programme to create a joint automation and assurance platform for service providers customers, SVP and GM of the Cisco networking data centre and provider connectivity unit Kevin Wollenweber revealed in a blog.

He noted Cisco planned to blend Accedian’s network performance and user experience monitoring capabilities with its ThousandEyes cloud for end-to-end network assurance.

Roy Chua, founder and principal analyst at research outfit AvidThink, told Mobile World Live while Accedian’s product lines are complementary to Cisco’s existing capabilities in assurance and monitoring, it provides more detail for service providers and enterprises which deploy its soft and hardware agents across their infrastructure.

“This level of detail, when combined with insights from ThousandEyes and analytics from Cisco’s Wi-Fi, switches, routers, and SASE and SD-WAN products, should enhance the observability and end-to-end assurance across the entire Cisco product range, extending even to the application layer with the integration of AppDynamics data.”

He noted the success of the deal hinges on whether Cisco can successfully integrate and foster collaboration across its product silos, an area he said the company “had mixed results in the past”.

Chua said Cisco already sells some Accedian products under its brand, with the company also being an OEM provider.

The planned acquisition follows Cisco’s M&A blueprint of building a technology platform and then buying another company to integrate on top of it using API models, which CEO Chuck Robbins outlined at Cisco Live earlier this month.