Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has made a bid to buy South Africa-based Wi-Fi monitoring software-as-a-service (SaaS) and hardware provider, Cape Networks, for an undisclosed sum.
The new acquisition will be a part of HPE’s Aruba arm to help expand its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered networking capabilities with a sensor-based service assurance solution that gives customers a simple, proactive, and network-agnostic tool for measuring and monitoring SaaS, application, and network services.
According to HPE, the solution helps organisations deliver the best end user experience through enabling IT to get ahead of service quality issues before they occur, accelerate time to resolution, and lower cost of operations.
Applying a sensor-based and network agnostic approach to service assurance, Cape Networks proactively tests the availability and performance of services and applications, alerting IT professionals of issues before they impact the user or the business.
“Cape Networks strengthens and further differentiates the Aruba mobile first architecture with a simple and intuitive, yet powerful, approach to optimising the end-user experience,” Aruba CTO, Partha Narasimhan, said in a statement.
“Mobile, IoT, and cloud continue to add pressure and complexity for IT organisations. Despite this, the quality of service and experiences can’t be compromised, especially for mission-critical business applications. With Cape Networks, IT can easily deploy and use a network of sensors to proactively optimise and remotely troubleshoot end user experiences for on-premises and cloud applications such as SAP, Salesforce.com, Microsoft Office and Wi-Fi captive portals.”
Cape Networks was established in 2014 and the acquisition is expected to close within the next couple of weeks.
At the time of the announcement, HPE shares were down 0.7 per cent premarket to US$17.86 on the New York Stock Exchange.
In February, HPE unveiled a US$7 billion share buyback program, reported strong quarterly results and raised its full-year profit forecast.
At least eight brokerages lifted their price targets on the stock. The results were the first under new CEO Antonio Neri, who took over from Meg Whitman in February.
