On May 1, Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) announced it was buying Viptela, a start-up in the field of SD-WAN (software-defined wide area networking). Wide area networks connect disparate branch offices within a single enterprise over long distances. As one can imagine, application management, security, and performance can become quite complicated when one is dealing with large, disparate offices, a mix of cloud-based and on-premises data centers, connected devices in the Internet of Things, and increased employee mobility.