The deal will be worth $97 million USD in cash and assumed options as the networking company adds a privately held San Jose company.
Sheer Networks makes intelligent network and service management products, which outwardly appears to be well-suited to the sort of products made by networking industry titan Cisco Systems.
Cisco appears to think the same thing, and has announced it will acquire Sheer’s technology. That $97 million figure could increase by as much as $25 million more, should Sheer meet certain development and product goals by the time the deal closes in early 2006, according to a press release.
Sheer calls its virtual network realization tool Dynamic Network Abstraction. Sheer DNA, targeted at larger firms and enterprises, provides a virtual view of network elements and services. It helps represent the flow of information from element to element.
Its product can display faults that happen on a network, and will recognize elements as they are added to the system. That automatic recognition goes beyond what a manually configured product like the Big Brother network monitor can do when an administrator adds a piece of hardware.
That Auto Discovery recognition can identify network entities across a swath of vendors and technologies. Sheer renders this virtual view through a trio of presentation GUI tools: NetworkVision, PathTracer, and Service View.
Cisco notes that its vision of network management allows for management of applications and services from a common platform. “Sheer has a similar philosophy and parallel architecture which will accelerate our delivery of Cisco’s next generation management platform and advanced applications to our Service Provider customers,” said Cliff Meltzer, senior vice president for Cisco’s Network Management Technology Group, in the statement.
David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
