Cisco recently announced that it will be buying out Acacia Communications for approximately $2.6 billion. Acacia specialises in designing and manufacturing high-speed, optical interconnect technologies that allow webscale companies, service providers, and data center operators to meet the fast-growing consumer demands for data.
As Cisco and Acacia come together, Cisco plans to support Acacia’s existing customers and new customers that want industry-leading coherent optics, digital signal processing / photonic integrated circuit modules, and transceivers for use in networking products and data centers.
“By innovating across software, silicon and optics, Cisco is reinventing every domain of the network with our intent-based architectures,” said David Goeckeler, executive vice president and general manager of Cisco’s networking and security business. “With the explosion of bandwidth in the multi-cloud era, optical interconnect technologies are becoming increasingly strategic. The acquisition of Acacia will allow us to build on the strength of our switching, routing and optical networking portfolio to address our customers’ most demanding requirements.”
Cisco offers a full portfolio of optical systems to support webscale, service provider, enterprise, and public sector customer segments. These optical systems address performance, power, and cost requirements. Acacia’s technology will enrich Cisco’s optical systems portfolio. It will also allow the growing number of customers transitioning from chassis-based systems to pluggable technology to simplify operations and reduce network complexities.
“Coherent technology has been a game-changer for optical networking and continues to evolve with the deployment of pluggable coherent optics,” said Raj Shanmugaraj, president and chief executive officer, Acacia. “Upon close, Cisco and Acacia will continue to serve and support existing Acacia customers. By integrating Acacia technology into Cisco’s networking portfolio, we believe we can accelerate the trend toward coherent technology and pluggable solutions while accommodating a larger footprint of customers worldwide.”
Once both companies are merged together, Acacia employees will join Cisco’s Optical Systems and Optics business within the networking and security business under David Goeckeler.
