Cisco is set to acquire San Jose startup CliQr Technologies for $260m as it continues to boost its cloud offerings.
CliQr was founded in 2010 by two former VMware engineers. It provides an application-defined cloud orchestration platform to model, deploy and manage applications onto any data centre, private or public cloud environment.
The CliQr platform connects business apps to heterogeneous data centre infrastructure, running on bare-metal, containers and virtualised environments.
The deal expands Cisco’s data centre portfolio with technology to simplify, automate and manage applications across hybrid cloud.
CliQr is already integrated with several of Cisco’s data centre switching and cloud solutions, including Application Centric Infrastructure and Unified Computing System.
Cisco said going forward it will continue to integrate CliQr across its data centre portfolio. The companies will make it easier for customers to automate and manage application policies across the entire data centre stack.
CliQr’s integration with Cisco ACI will allow application portability for on-premise and cloud environments. Cisco also said CliQr has out-of-the box support for all major public cloud environments.
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The CliQr team will join Cisco’s insieme business unit reporting to Prem Jain, senior vice president and general manager.
The acquisition is expected to complete in the third quarter of fiscal year 2016, subject to customary closing conditions.
Cisco Corporate Development vice president Rob Salvagno said: "Customers today have to manage a massive number of complex and different applications across many clouds.
"With CliQr, Cisco will be able to help our customers realize the promise of the cloud and easily manage the lifecycle of their applications on any hybrid cloud environment."
Cisco has also unveiled new data centre innovations to speed up hybrid cloud deployments.
The company claims that the new SDN-ready Nexus switches offer cloud scale 10/25/40/50/100Gpbs, with up to 10 times performance improvement at industry leading price points.
The new switching platforms offer the scale, telemetry, security, and performance required for distributed containers and microservices, as well as the lossless traffic needed for IP storage and hyperconverged infrastructure.
