Cisco Snaps Up Singularity Networks to Bolster Network Automation Unit

Cisco has agreed to acquire Singularity Networks, a company that monitors, collects, and analyzes service provider, web company, and enterprise networks.

As the amount of data traversing a network explodes, even small changes and adjustments mean a lot. Finding and remediating problems is the highest profile task. Network automation platforms also identify hidden efficiencies, provide data for network planning, and determine how applications can work better. Building infrastructure that continually monitors the network to find these flaws and areas for improvement is vital – but increasingly challenging as demand grows and virtualized and cloud-based platforms proliferate.

Vendors, service providers, and their ecosystems naturally are throwing a lot of money at this challenge. Some of Cisco’s money is going to Singularity, which now is a private company based in Lone Tree, Colorado.

The company uses agents to find data in virtual machines (VMs), routers, firewalls, and switches in an organization’s data center and clouds. It analyzes the data using open source and commercial systems to provide contextual insight into the applications and infrastructure. That data is provided to users on both out-of-the-box and customized dashboards.

Singularity’s LinkedIn profile says that it has 10 or fewer employees and was founded in 2014. It has had two rounds of funding, the latest of which was a $2.7 million round in March, 2016.

If the deal closes, the company will become part of Cisco’s Crosswork Network Automation portfolio, which is in its service provider business unit.

Cisco’s Crosswork portfolio divides its task into four groups: change automation, network insights, situation management, and network health. The goals, a Cisco spokesperson told SDxCentral, are both to repair and prevent problems.

“For example, customers can use analytics enhanced closed-loop automation to automatically remediate network issues as they happen, as well as real-time visualization with analytics to provide unparalleled insight into network performance,” the spokesperson explained.

At Cisco’s CiscoLive EMEA 2019 event last month, Itential announced that it deepened its integration with Cisco’s Network Services Orchestrator (NSO). The new functionality furthers network automation capabilities by making it possible to automate in a “low-code” environment that allows personnel with lower technical skills to use the tools. Products from the two companies possibly will work together under the Cisco umbrella.

“Cisco NSO is the foundation of the Cisco Crosswork product family,” a Cisco spokesperson wrote in an email. “When we set out to build a closed-loop network automation solution, we recognized the best solution to address the scale and scope of the problem was the Cisco NSO usage of YANG data models for streaming telemetry southbound into the network elements and open API’s northbound to share information across applications. Whereas Cisco NSO had solved the multi-vendor orchestration dilemma, Cisco Crosswork applications could also benefit by using the same framework for multi-vendor and third-party network automation.”

Source: sdxcentral

Industry: unified communication news