4. Riverbed Technology Acquires Xirrus

Purchase Price: Not disclosed

Xirrus, one of the last stand-alone wireless networking vendors in the market, was acquired by San Francisco-based Riverbed Technology to boost its software-defined WAN capabilities by extending Riverbed's SteelConnect product line to the wireless network edge. Riverbed will integrate SteelConnect with Xirrus's high density and cloud-managed Wi-Fi offerings.

Riverbed touts SteelConnect as a differentiated SD-WAN offering that provides simplicity, network and application intelligence, and agility with centralized and unified management spanning the entire network fabric with policy-based orchestration. SteelConnect also provides connectivity to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Riverbed will also continue to offer Xirrus as a stand-alone wireless WAN offering.