Brocade Bolsters NFV Platform With Vistapointe Buy

Brocade officials are hoping to give their network operator customers that are adopting network-functions virtualization greater visibility into their architectures with the acquisition of Vistapointe.

Brocade announced the all-cash transaction Sept. 15. No financial details were disclosed.

According to company officials, mobile network operators (MNOs) are looking for tools that will enable them to better visualize, manage, analyze and secure the data traffic from their subscribers, gaining greater insight with the goal of offering better services and user experiences.

This will be increasingly important as the MNOs embrace 4G LTE technology for billions of mobile devices now and begin to migrate to 5G technology in the near future, the officials said. Vistapointe’s network intelligence technologies—including VIPE (Vistapointe Intelligence Protocol Engines), VACE (Vistapointe Analysis and Correlation Engine) and ViVID (Vistapointe Visualization and Insight Dashboard)—are designed to help network operators tap into the subscriber data, and can be used in-network or via the cloud.

The products will complement Brocade’s efforts in network-functions virtualization (NFV), an increasingly popular technology among service providers that removes network tasks—such as load balancing and firewalls—from the network hardware and puts them into software that can run on commodity x86 servers. Brocade in June introduced the Vyatta Platform, the first step in the company’s multi-year initiative to build out an open and modular networking platform based on NFV and software-defined networking (SDN) concepts.

In addition, the Vistapointe products will complement Brocade’s MLX-based IP telemetry products, giving MNOs a strong network intelligence solution, Brocade officials said. Vistapointe’s products will become part of a new Network Visibility and Analytics group within Brocade.

“With the massive growth in connected devices and the dominance of data in mobile networks, network visibility and analytics will be more important than ever,” Jason Nolet, vice president of Brocade’s Switching, Routing and Analytics products group, and the executives who will oversee the company’s new unit, said in a statement. “And, as mobile operators continue the aggressive pace at which they intend to adopt software networking solutions, they will benefit from complementary, NFV-based analytics tools to improve subscriber quality of experience and security while also dramatically reducing costs.”

As part of the deal, Vistapointe CEO Ravi Medikonda is now vice president of the Network Visibility and Analytics group. Brocade has hired the Vistapointe development team, which will report to Medikonda.