Cisco to Acquire CliQr for $260 Million

Networking giant Cisco Systems (CSCO) could be growing even larger following the company’s announcement on Tuesday that it intends to acquire San Jose-based CliQr Technologies for $260 million in cash and assumed equity awards.

If the deal is completed, Cisco will have access to CliQr’s application-defined cloud orchestration platform, giving customers the ability to modify their cloud deployments, according to the announcement. CliQr’s CloudCenter platform currently allows users to “model, deploy and manage applications across bare metal, virtualized and container environments,” the company said.

“Customers today have to manage a massive number of complex and different applications across many clouds,” said Rob Salvagno, vice president of Cisco Corporate Development, in a statement. “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 previously integrated CliQr’s technology into several of its data center switching and cloud solutions, such as the Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure and the company’s Unified Computing System. Once the acquisition is complete, Cisco said it plans to continue this integration and aims to simplify the automation and management of joint customers’ application policies, according to the press release.

CliQr employees are expected to become members of Cisco’s Insieme Business Unit following the deal’s completion, which is expected to close in Cisco’s Q3 2016.

As noted by TechCrunch, this also marks the 195th acquisition in Cisco’s history.

Talkin’ Cloud has reached out to Cisco representatives for more information on the deal and will update this story when more information is available.