Cisco to acquire Meraki for US$1.2 billion

In its second acquisition in less than three days, Cisco has announced that it will buy cloud infrastructure company Meraki for US$1.2 billion.

Meraki, which offers wireless infrastructure products, was founded in 2006 by MIT candidates with the backing of Sequoia Capital and Google. The company boasts 18,000 customer networks in 145 countries, with customers including Westfield, Burger King, Accor, Radisson, THQ, and the US Department of Energy.

Under the deal, Meraki will become Cisco's new Cloud Networking Group, and the acquisition is expected to be completed in the second quarter of Cisco's fiscal year in 2013.

In a letter to employees, Meraki CEO Sanjit Biswas said that the offer from Cisco had been attractive, and that Cisco understands the team, culture, and environment in Meraki.

"After several weeks of consideration, we decided late last week that joining Cisco was the right path for Meraki, and will help us achieve our goal of having maximum impact. As founders, all three of us plan to stay on as leaders of the business unit, and look forward to continue towards our goal of US$1 billion in annual revenue. We continue to be transparent with you all, and while some things, like our email addresses, etc, will change in our day-to-day operations, we will ensure the important things like our culture stay the same," he said.

Cisco's senior vice president of enterprise networking Rob Soderbery said that Meraki will allow Cisco to offer managed networks to mid-sized businesses.

"Meraki's solution was built from the ground up optimised for cloud with tremendous scale, and is already in use by thousands of customers to manage hundreds of thousands of devices," he said in a statement.

It is the second company that Cisco has announced it will acquire in less than a week, after the company announced on Friday that it would buy datacentre-management software company Cloupia for US$125 million.