Cisco makes fourth acquisition in a month

Cisco this week announced its intent to acquire BroadHop, a developer of network management servers and software for carriers.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. The acquisition is Cisco's fourth in the past month.

BroadHop's products provide policy control and service management for mobile and fixed carrier networks. Cisco says it will help offer carrier customers more flexible control and personalisation of their networks and services, and boost service revenue, by enabling end users to purchase customised premium service packages from service providers.

Cisco cites the growth of global IP traffic - triple over the next five years after increasing eightfold over the past five - as a rationale for the BroadHop purchase and the need to offer policy control and services creation at large scale. BroadHop had already been a service provider Wi-Fi partner of Cisco's, the company says.

BroadHop's policy control technology is also consistent with Cisco's ONE network programmability strategy to enable software control of the network through applications, policy and orchestration tools.

BroadHop will be integrated into Cisco's Service Provider Networking Group, reporting to Shailesh Shukla, vice president and general manager of the company's Software and Applications Group.