Cisco Announces Intent to Acquire OpenDNS

SAN JOSE, CA–(Marketwired – Jun 30, 2015) – Today, Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO, news, filings) announced its intent to acquire OpenDNS, a privately held security company based in San Francisco. OpenDNS provides advanced threat protection for any device, anywhere, anytime. The acquisition will boost Cisco’s Security Everywhere approach by adding broad visibility and threat intelligence from the OpenDNS cloud delivered platform.

The burgeoning digital economy and the Internet of Everything (IoE) are expected to spur the connection of nearly 50 billion devices by 2020, creating a vast new wave of opportunities for security breaches across networks. The faster customers can deploy a solution, the faster they can detect, block and remediate these emerging security threats. OpenDNS’ cloud platform offers security delivered in a Software-as-a- Service (SaaS) model, making it quick and easy for customers to deploy and integrate as part of their defense architecture or incident response strategies. By providing comprehensive threat awareness and pervasive visibility, the combination of Cisco and OpenDNS will enhance advanced threat protection across the full attack continuum — before, during and after an attack.

Typically devices and people connected to the network are easier to identify and track for potential security threats. However in a world in which devices and people can connect from anywhere at anytime, enterprise IT teams have increasingly limited visibility into potential threats from these unmonitored and potentially unsecure entry points into the network, creating tremendous security risk. Combining OpenDNS’ broad visibility, unique predictive threat intelligence and cloud platform with Cisco’s robust security and threat capabilities will increase awareness across the extended network, both on- and off-premise, reduce the time to detect and respond to threats, and mitigate risk of a security breach.

“As more people, processes, data and things become connected, opportunities for security breaches and malicious threats grow exponentially when away from secure enterprise networks,” said Hilton Romanski, Cisco chief technology and strategy officer. “OpenDNS has a strong team with deep security expertise and key technology that complements Cisco’s security vision. Together, we will help customers protect their extended network wherever the user is and regardless of the device.”

The OpenDNS team will join the Cisco Security Business Group organization led by David Goeckeler, senior vice president and general manager. Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco will pay $635 million in cash and assumed equity awards, plus retention based incentives for OpenDNS. The acquisition is expected to close in the first quarter of fiscal year 2016, subject to customary closing conditions.

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Forward-Looking Statements

This press release may be deemed to contain forward-looking statements, which are subject to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including the expected completion of the acquisition and the time frame in which this will occur, the expected benefits to Cisco and its customers from completing the acquisition, and plans regarding OpenDNS personnel. Readers are cautioned that these forward-looking statements are only predictions and may differ materially from actual future events or results due to a variety of factors, including, among other things, the potential impact on the business of OpenDNS due to the uncertainty about the acquisition, the retention of employees of OpenDNS and the ability of Cisco to successfully integrate OpenDNS and to achieve expected benefits, business and economic conditions and growth trends in the networking industry, customer markets and various geographic regions, global economic conditions and uncertainties in the geopolitical environment and other risk factors set forth in Cisco’s most recent reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q. Any forward-looking statements in this release are based on limited information currently available to Cisco, which is subject to change, and Cisco will not necessarily update the information.