Fortinet has closed its $44 million acquisition of Wi-Fi specialist Meru Networks.
The deal will give Fortinet a bigger foothold in the $5 billion global enterprise Wi-Fi market, with integrated secure wireless solutions.
Fortinet already offers the FortiAP secure wireless access points and FortiWiFi integrated security appliances for enterprise branch offices and small businesses, which are part of the company’s “advanced technologies” portfolio. The addition of Meru’s intelligent Wi-Fi solutions to the Fortinet portfolio extends the company’s reach into vertical markets, especially in environments requiring high capacity load and a high-density of wireless users, such as enterprise, education, healthcare and hospitality.
The bring your own device (BYOD) concept has brought the power of convenient connectivity and efficiency to end users, who have come to expect secure access to their enterprise network, regardless of location. However, this expansion of the network to unknown and untrusted mobile devices creates significant IT security risks amidst a rapidly deepening cyber-threat environment. Fortinet said that it plans to focus on the convergence of security and wireless by developing an integrated, secure network fabric and enabling protection of transmitted information, while allowing efficient management of the network and devices.
“To truly protect against all possible attack vectors, we are continuing to expand our market-leading end-to-end security platform to provide customers with the visibility and continuous threat protection they need—from the data center, to the cloud to the end-point,” said Ken Xie, founder, chairman and CEO of Fortinet. “We expect the acquisition of Meru to help us deliver new solutions and services to help enterprises of all sizes deploy, manage, and secure wired and wireless networks in a mobile era.”
Meru’s broad solution set includes:
• Access points that deliver wireless connectivity to support data, voice, and video applications
• Controllers to optimize wireless traffic across access points and client devices
• SDN enabled Wi-Fi system software that manages and secures wired and wireless LANs, and provisions Wi-Fi enabled end-user devices.
• Cloud and virtual wireless controllers and appliances for deploying and scaling wireless infrastructure through a data center or private cloud environment
“The acquisition of Meru Networks maps to our overall security vision of combining strong network security with ubiquitous connectivity,” said Xie. “We believe the extension of our market-leading end-to-end security platform will increase our growth opportunities and benefit our customers and partners globally.”
With the completion of the transaction, Meru employees officially join Fortinet, and Meru will become a wholly owned subsidiary.