It’s not always DNS… Cisco snaps up Greek BGP specialist
Deal puts Greece's technology talent -- and ongoing Border Gateway Protocol challenges -- back on the map.
Cisco has bought an influential company specialising in BGP monitoring – taking an emerging rival to its ThousandEyes into the tent and bolstering its broader Border Gateway Protocol capabilities and toolings.
Cisco acquisition Code BGP was founded in Greece; spun-off its publicly funded Institute of Computer Science. Its founders helped create the ARTEMIS open source software for BGP prefix hijacking detection.
(BGP is a routing protocol that “stitches the Internet together” and finds the most efficient path for network traffic. As the way through which internet users know specific IP addresses, it can be – and not infrequently is – hijacked in man-in-the-middle or other BGP routing attacks.)
Cisco Code BGP deal welcomed by team
Cisco’s Code BGP acquisition was welcomed by ThousandEyes; a company with BGP monitoring capabilities bought by Cisco in 2020.
ThousandEyes’ Joe Vaccaro said: “This year alone, more than 6,000 incidents of BGP hijacks, route leaks, and other issues occurred across the many thousands of networks that make up the Internet...
“[The Code BGP team] will enrich our already accomplished pool of Internet research and engineering talent, enabling us to increase our BGP monitoring capabilities and pace of innovation so we can accelerate our customers’ troubleshooting and optimization…”
The Stack has asked Cisco whether it will support the ongoing open source contribution by the Code BGP team to ARTEMIS and will update this story with comment when we get it, but the acquisition appears to have been warmly welcomed by the Code BGP team; not least for putting Greek's technology talent on the map. As they wrote in a joint post: "We are very proud that our acquisition brings ThousandEyes to the Heraklion and Athens ecosystems in Greece, which are filled with high-quality talent from local institutes, such as the University of Crete and FORTH. Research and innovation have been integral to ThousandEyes since its founding, and we believe that this collaboration will be extremely beneficial for all..."
The Code BGP acquisition is Cisco's third since June It follows agreement to buy network monitoring companies Accedian and SamKnows.
