Fortinet Buys Network Monitoring Player Panopta To Aid Uptime

Panopta will provide customers with a full picture of every service, network device and application in any deployment regardless of whether it’s on-premises, in the cloud, in a container or in a hybrid environment.

Fortinet has purchased Panopta to gain visibility into and automate management of enterprise network components like servers, containers, applications, databases, virtual appliances and cloud infrastructure.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based platform security vendor said its acquisition of Chicago-based Panopta will provide customers with a full picture of every service, network device and application in any deployment regardless of whether it’s on-premises, in the cloud, in a container or in a hybrid environment. Panopta’s network monitoring and diagnostics platform will strengthen Fortinet’s operations management muscle.

“Fortinet’s acquisition of Panopta complements our best-in-class security offerings with a SaaS platform that provides further network visibility and agile remediation for hybrid environments, including edge and cloud networks, to achieve even greater security and business efficiency,” Ken Xie, Fortinet’s founder, chairman and CEO, said in a statement.

[Related: Fortinet Buys Cloud Security Startup Opaq To Protect Networks]

Panopta was founded in 2007, employs 38 people, and has raised an undisclosed amount of money in two rounds of outside funding, according to LinkedIn and Crunchbase. Panopta founder and CEO Jason Abate isn’t mentioned in the acquisition press release, and Fortinet declined to comment on whether Abate will remain with the company.

Fortinet’s stock is up $2.67 (2.08 percent) to $130.75 in trading Tuesday morning, which is the highest the company’s stock has traded since Oct. 20. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, and Fortinet executives weren’t immediately available for additional comment.

“Panopta’s platform is built to be partner-friendly, empowering MSSPs and value-add partners to easily integrate the multitenant solution into their own offering,” John Maddison, Fortinet chief marketing officer and executive vice president of products, wrote in a blog post. “Role-based access control capabilities allow MSPs and MSSPs to separate their infrastructure by team, location or customer to keep deployments organized.”

Folding Panopta into Fortinet is expected to enhance the effectiveness of the infrastructure that powers Fortinet’s security services, including email, security analytics, web application firewalls and its SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) service. Panopta is also expected to enhance Fortinet’s SD-WAN connectivity and performance thanks to integration with the company’s SD-WAN and firewall offerings.

Integrating Panopta’s automated incident management into Fortinet’s SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation and Response) platform will help IT teams proactively diagnose and resolve network health incidents. Panopta can also analyze network health metrics and application performance to identify problems that may impact user access as well as enable rapid, automated remediation.

“Panopta surfaces warning signs and leading indicators on availability, performance, security, and service quality of applications and infrastructure,” Maddison wrote in the blog post. “This means that SASE services, email, security analytics, VPNs and web application firewalls can easily and continuously be monitored in real time to turn incident response from reactive to proactive.”

Panopta’s unified monitoring and automated incident management is expected to reduce response and resolution times for Network Operations Center teams, helping them exceed their service-level agreements. The company also has more than 50 global points of presence with low-cost probes to simulate application performance and latency that may impact the end-user experience, Fortinet said.

Cloud-native monitoring for Kubernetes and Platform-as-a-Service workloads in Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure is available thanks to Panopta’s network monitoring, detection and incident response capabilities. In addition, Fortinet said Panopta can fully configure alerting workflows through out-of-the-box integration with third-party enterprise and modern communication tools.

Panopta is used by technology companies like HCL, Informatica and Nvidia to Ivy League institutions such as Cornell and Penn State to sports organizations like the Arizona Cardinals, according to the company’s website.

The Panopta transaction comes just five months after Fortinet bought Opaq for $8 million to strengthen distributed network protection everywhere from data centers and branch offices to remote users and Internet of Things devices. In 2019, Fortinet bought SOAR provider CyberSponse for $26.1 million and endpoint security startup enSilo for $15.8 million.

All told, Fortinet has acquired 15 companies since its founding in 2000, according to Crunchbase.