Cisco and ThousandEyes to enable visibility across the internet as the ‘new network’

2020 has been a year not quite like any other for ThousandEyes Inc., a network intelligence company that produces software that analyzes the performance of local and wide area networks. Cisco Systems Inc. completed acquiring the company in August, and this took place in the midst of dealing with a pandemic where people worked from home and the internet became crucial for network operations and automation for companies across the globe.

So how is this acquisition moving forward into the continuing digital transformation?

“It’s really been an exciting six months for ThousandEyes,” said Joe Vaccaro (pictured), vice president of product at ThousandEyes. “That change [of the pandemic] alone really … amplified even some of the fundamental beliefs that we have as a company. That cloud is becoming the new data center for customers, that internet has become the new network and the new enterprise network backbone, and that SaaS has really become the new application stack. And as you think about these last six months, those fundamental truths have never been more evident.”

Vaccaro spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the Cisco Accelerating Automation With DevNet event. They discussed the growing importance of networks and automation. (* Disclosure below.)

Helping IT gain visibility and implement automation across the internet

As many employees are still working remotely, companies are increasingly relying upon the cloud and home networks to enable productive operations, according to Vaccaro. The problem is that if a company doesn’t own these networks, it makes them lack the ability to understand the digital space they’re inhabiting.

“Ultimately, the IT organization is really chartered with not just delivering the infrastructure, but delivering the right experience,” Vaccaro said. “And you have to then have a way to be able to see, to gain that visibility of that experience. To measure and understand it, and to provide that intelligence and then ultimately to act on it, be able to ensure that your employees as well as your customers are getting the right overall … approach to be able to leverage those assets.”

ThousandEyes is trying to solve that and help customers achieve more visibility across networks and the internet, which is hugely important when it comes to topics like automation because of the outages that can occur on the internet. A company has to be able to gain the level of visibility and be able to test to provide the level of active measurements to inspect the network from the right vantage points.

Cisco’s ability withing network and application performance, combined with visibility enabled by ThousandEyes, will allow customers to have an end-to-end view into the digital delivery of applications and services over the internet, according to Vaccaro.

“Data alone doesn’t solve that problem,” he said. “You need to enable that data to become intelligent, and that intelligence comes through the automation of being able to process that data very quickly to allow you to be able to see the unseen, allow you to be able to quickly understand the issues that are happening across this digital supply chain to identify issues that are even happening outside of your own control across the public internet.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Cisco Accelerating Automation With DevNet event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Accelerating Automation With DevNet event. Neither Cisco Systems Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE