Cisco acquires Accedian to improve its service assurance solutions portfolio

Cisco has acquired Accedian. This has been a long-awaited deal that will safeguard Cisco’s service assurance portfolio and enhance its automation capabilities. 

Assurance solutions, alongside service design and orchestration and network orchestration systems, provide the foundation for communications service providers (CSPs) to achieve fully autonomous operations. CSPs need all three of these interworking OSS elements to achieve the goal of autonomous operations, with assurance being the most-critical component. Until now, Cisco has used a technology partnership to cover this gap in its portfolio; it has used Accedian’s Skylight to complement the Cisco Crosswork network automation platform, which enables end users to review network performance and service quality and provides analytics for near-real-time performance insights. 

However, in response to considerable M&A activity in the assurance market (Figure 1) and CSPs’ demands for autonomous operations, Cisco decided to acquire Accedian before another company seized the opportunity.