Cisco Acquires Pari: What Goes Around, Comes Around

Cisco this week announced its intent to acquire privately-held Pari Networks, a provider of network configuration, change and compliance management appliances that was founded by former Cisco engineers.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Cisco says Pari’s appliances will complement its “smart service” capabilities by enhancing the ability of Cisco and its partners to manage the health and stability of customer networks through proactive, personalized services. This will help customers identify potential network problems before they occur and optimize the performance of their networks, Cisco says.

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Cisco says it and its partners have been evolving professional and technical service offerings from reactive to proactive by embedding these so-called smart service capabilities.

Pari’s products are designed to help customers stay on top of updates across devices and ease compliance audits. The company developed its Paritra appliances to include policy, compliance and audit assessment mitigation features.

The devices include customizable templates for regulatory-compliance regulations, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, and Payment Card Industry standards.

Pari’s rack mountable appliances include agent software that can be installed on devices to collect and report on configuration, change and compliance data. Pari also offers a network assessment tool that provides configuration snapshots for compliance and other audits.

The acquisition is subject to various standard closing conditions and is expected to be completed in the third quarter of Cisco’s fiscal year 2011. Upon close, Pari Networks employees will be integrated into Cisco’s Technical Services organization.

Pari, based in Milpitas, Calif., was founded in April 2005 by by former Cisco engineers and marketers. While at Cisco, Pari CEO Kishore Kumar found the time it took for Cisco’s tools to support configuration updates too long to secure network devices adequately from potential threats.

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