The OSS mini-bubble continues with another acquisition of OSS assets by a hardware vendor. This time it’s Riverbed, who provide boxes for network monitoring and performance optimisation, buying Opnet, suppliers of software for network and application management.
Riverbed are paying approximately $1 billion for Opnet which, based on expected revenues of $198 million this year, means a reasonably healthy 5-times multiplier. That’s a lot better than some of the recent OSS exits, most of which looked a lot more like fire-sales. But Opnet has relatively good revenues: Sizeable, but still lumpy and unpredictable like any business selling to telco and large enterprises. Opnet has also been successful in moving in to data-centre, WAN and service management with their Application Performance Management products, giving them a portfolio that has a broader market than pure OSS/carrier-class product suites.
In fact, you could argue this isn’t really an OSS acquisition but rather an IT acquisition: Most of Opnet’s value today is not in their original network performance management products as the company’s focus has shifted to application performance management in recent years.
You can find a bit more info in their PR here.