Fenwick & West and Gunderson Dettmer scoop roles on Cisco's acquisition of Virtuata

Cisco has acquired Virtuata, a cloud computing and security start up that started life two years ago, in an ongoing bid to boost its offering in virtualisation and cloud computing and allow the company to develop new tools related to computing and data centre infrastructure.

Fenwick acted as sole outside counsel to Cisco, with co-chair of the firm’s mergers and acquisitions group Douglas Cogen and fellow corporate partners Kris Withrow leading the team.

Fenwick has acted as long-standing counsel to Cisco and most recently advised the company on the US aspects of its $5bn (£3.26bn) acquisition of video software company NDS Group. (18 June 2012)

Silicon Valley rival Gunderson acted as counsel for Virtuata, with corporate partner Joshua Cook and executive compensation and employee benefits partner Sharon Hendricks leading the deal. Gunderson has been advising Virtuata since its inception in 2010.

White the financial terms have not been publicly disclosed, the deal makes Virtuata Cisco’s fifth acquisition of 2012 so far and its fourth focused on networking and data centre infrastructure.

Find out more about Cisco’s acquisition history and its in-house legal team in this year’s Transatlantic Elite.