Channel Beat: Symantec's Big Blue Coat Buy

Symantec is making its first acquisition as a standalone security vendor - this week the company announced it will acquire Blue Coat Systems for $4.65 billion.

Blue Coat CEO Greg Clark will assume the role of Symantec CEO, taking over for Symantec's current CEO, Mike Brown.

Bain Capital currently owns Blue Coat, and it will reinvest $750 million in the combined company.

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The transaction should close by the third quarter of this year.

Cisco is launching an analytics platform to offer channel partners more insight into their customers' data centers in real time.

The Cisco Tetration Analytics platform took two years to develop, and can be installed into any data center.

Cisco calls the platform completely open, and a single appliance can monitor up to 1 million unique data flows per second.

The platform offers hardware and service plays for the channel in the IoT space.

After much debate, the Net Neutrality doctrine was upheld by a federal appeals court this week, and channel partners favor the decision.

The decision bans Internet service providers from prioritizing specific traffic, creating "fast lanes" for content from some providers and slowing traffic from others.

The FCC can now also regulate wireless and fixed-line broadband providers like telephone service providers.

Partners say the ruling keeps the Internet open and provides for widespread growth.