Contact: Mark Fontecchio, Scott Denne
Emerging opportunities in the network monitoring space lead Francisco Partners to make its first foray into networking and its largest solo purchase in eight years as the investment firm swoops in to buy Procera Networks, a deep-packet inspection vendor that was being hounded by activist investors.
Network monitoring and visibility was a significant driver of M&A activity in 2014, including Ixia’s $190m reach for Net Optics (with a similar multiple to today’s deal) and multibillion-dollar acquisitions of Riverbed and Danaher’s networking performance business. The sale of Procera is the largest in this category so far this year, but not the only one. Last month, Lookingglass Cyber Solutions picked up Procera competitor CloudShield.
As we highlighted in our 2015 M&A Outlook, we anticipate that smaller players in this space will continue to consolidate amid the convergence of application performance management, network performance management and network visibility. Though consolidation is coming, that’s not to say the market has matured. In the latest networking survey by TheInfoPro, a service of 451 Research, network monitoring was cited as a top pain point by 19% of network admins, up from 13% a year earlier.
![procera-1_copy_2[1]](http://blogs.451research.com/techdeals/files/2015/04/procera-1_copy_21.png)
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