Those folks at Private Equity Week apparently know their stuff.
In a July 21 article, editor-at-large Dan Primack wrote that Motorola was close to acquiring television-on-demand company Broadbus, Inc. for approximately $186 million in cash, and that that move would set of a flood of M&A activity in the space.
Several days later it came to pass that Motorola scooped up Broadbus.
People started talking about what moves Cisco might make to counter that acquisition by one of its main rivals. At the time, conventional thinking held that Cisco would partner with or flat-out acquire Arroyo Video Solutions, a Pleasanton, California-based provider of solutions for the burgeoning video on demand (VoD) market.
Well, it appears that the good folks at Private Equity Week must have an uncle in the M&A business.
Late Monday evening, Cisco announced an agreement to acquire Arroyo for approximately $92 million in cash.
Arroyo creates video networking software designed to intelligently pool and load balance servers based on industry-standard hardware to deliver unlimited network scalability and non-stop service availability at the lowest total cost.
Arroyo has a global assortment of service provider customers, including U.S. cable giants Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Charter.
Cisco’s Mike Volpi, senior vice president and general manager, routing and service provider technology group, hopes the integration of the Arroyo platform into their IP-NGN (Next Generation Network) architecture will help carriers accelerate the creation and distribution of network delivered entertainment, interactive media, and advertising services to any device in the ever growing array of media-capable endpoints, including televisions, PCs, handheld devices, and the like.
“The entertainment industry is going through a major shift while consumer desire for personalized on-demand service is on the rise,” said Volpi. “The industry is quickly evolving from pure video-on demand to anything-on-demand with any content delivered to any end device.
“With the addition of Arroyo’s innovative software, which offers flexibility in content delivery, service providers will be in a position to serve content how, when, and where consumers want it.”
