Cisco to acquire hybrid cloud management player CliQr for $260m

Cisco is acquiring CliQr Technologies for its application-defined cloud orchestration platform. CliQr’s technology is used to model, deploy and manage applications across bare metal, virtualised and container environments.

Cisco will pay $260 million in cash and assumed equity awards for CliQr, plus retention based incentives. The acquisition is expected to close in the third quarter of fiscal year 2016.

The acquisition, said Cisco, will help its customers simplify and accelerate their private, public and hybrid cloud deployments. CliQr is already integrated with a number of Cisco’s data centre switching and cloud solutions, including Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and Unified Computing System (UCS).

CliQr provides customers with a single, intuitive platform that helps them manage the entire application lifecycle across hybrid IT environments. The company’s CloudCenter platform provides a solution to IT organisations whether they are moving their first applications to the cloud, deploying self-service IT environments, or wanting to gain visibility and control across a vast portfolio of clouds, applications and users.

“Customers today have to manage a massive number of complex and different applications across many clouds,” said Rob Salvagno, vice president, Cisco Corporate Development. “With CliQr, we will be able to help our customers realise the promise of the cloud and easily manage the lifecycle of their applications in any hybrid cloud environment.”

Moving forward, Cisco will continue to integrate CliQr across its data centre portfolio. CliQr already integrates with Cisco ACI to enable application portability for on-premise and cloud environments. In addition, CliQr has out-of-the box support for all major public cloud environments.

The CliQr team will join Cisco’s Insieme business unit reporting to Prem Jain, senior vice president and general manager.

@AntonySavvas