Ixia, a leading, global provider of converged IP and wireless network test solutions, on Monday said that that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Anue Systems, Inc. (Anue), a leading developer of Network Visibility solutions.

Under the terms of the agreement, Ixia will pay $145 million in cash, subject to certain adjustments including an adjustment based on the amount of Anue's net working capital at closing. The transaction is anticipated to close in the second quarter of 2012, and is subject to customary closing conditions and approvals.

With the acquisition of Anue, Ixia will become a leading player in the rapidly growing network visibility market, a market that is growing over 30 percent per year and will enhance Ixia's service provider presence and create new opportunities among enterprise customers.

Anue grew revenues 51 percent in 2011 to $40.5 million and generated gross margins of 83 percent for the year. For the 12 months ended March 31, 2012, Anue generated $47.6 million in revenues. Ixia expects this transaction to be accretive to non GAAP earnings beginning in the third quarter of 2012. Non GAAP earnings exclude stock based compensation, amortization of acquired intangible assets, and other non recurring charges, net of the applicable tax effects.

As applications increasingly run in cloud networks and large data centers, service providers and large enterprises need better visibility into application performance. Traditional monitoring solutions cannot scale to successfully analyze the number of applications, services, and immense amounts of traffic across wired and mobile networks. Anue's Net Tool Optimizer^™ solution efficiently aggregates and filters network traffic to help optimize network monitoring tool usage. This efficiency creates significant customer value by maximizing IT resources, streamlining network troubleshooting, and expanding network monitoring capacity.

"Many networking trends such as the deployment of cloud and virtualization, LTE and mobility driven growth, security implications of applications delivered over cloud infrastructures, and the massive expansion in bandwidth are fueling both Ixia's and Anue's growth," said Vic Alston, Ixia chief operating officer. "Next-generation cloud providers, mobility operators and enterprises all require network and traffic visibility to maintain quality of service across application and service delivery. Anue's Optimizer solutions provide customers with a measurable value regarding performance, scale, and resiliency of networks, while enabling the creation of a next generation platform for quality of service delivery across live networks."

With the acquisition of Anue, Ixia will become a leading player in the rapidly growing network visibility market a market that is growing over 30 percent per year and will enhance Ixia's service provider presence and create new opportunities among enterprise customers.

Alex Pepe, Chief Executive Officer of Anue, said, "I'm truly excited about the power of this combination and the opportunities it creates for our respective customers and employees. This transaction will give Ixia reach into our service provider and enterprise customers, while Anue's products will benefit from Ixia's international channels. Ixia and Anue together will bring value to customers by helping to build and operate networks that deliver high value applications and services with quality, scale and resiliency."

The terms of the agreement were unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both Ixia and Anue.