Tech titan, Cisco has announced to acquire San Jose based CliQr, a cloud orchestration startup that enables enterprises to consolidate their cloud services. Paying big bucks, Cisco is buying CliQr for $260 Million in cash and equity awards and is expected to close in the third quarter of fiscal year 2016. The start-up’s CloudCenter platform aids enterprise-class customers to manage their move in today’s hybrid IT environment and is used to make software applications deploy effectively across public, private and hybrid cloud domain. About 100 CliQr employees will be joining Cisco according to the deal.
Enabling enterprises
The merger will enable enterprises to create a single application profile and deploy it to a public or private cloud, and to any data center. It can be availed through an enterprise’s access control and security policies to an application, and then ensure that those policies move with the app. The CliQr technology will determine app performance in any cloud environment and provide a one-click single management interface to control and monitor apps, users, and cloud environments.
It is already integrated with a number of Cisco’s data center switching and cloud solutions, including Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and Unified Computing System (UCS) and this acquisition comes at a point where users are in search of cross-cloud platforms that will deploy the life-cycle of business applications faster, reducing computing chores. In the business of companies like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, this synergy will enable technology and corporate software run more efficiently across internal data centers as well as public cloud data centers.
The agreement will bolster Cisco’s offerings for the cloud computing market with CliQr’s Box support for major public cloud environments, a field pioneered by startups like Nutanix and will drive home efficiency, security and management of hybrid cloud IT for their mutual customers.
The CliQr team will join Cisco’s Insieme Business Unit reporting to Prem Jain, Senior Vice President and General Manager and will be integrated as a part of its Cisco One Enterprise Cloud Suite.
Earlier in October, last year, Cisco had acquired Cologne-based startup ParStream that provides a database for analyzing large amounts of IoT data, followed by the acquisition of Jasper Technologies earlier this month and with this shop, Cisco plans to expand its hybrid cloud management system.
Rob Salvagno, VP, Cisco Corporate Development, 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.”
CliQr had raised just over $38 million from investments led by Google Ventures, Foundation Capital, InstantScale Ventures, Polaris Partners and Translink Capital.
Gaurav Manglik, Founder & CEO, CLiQr
Gaurav Manglik, Founder and CEO, CliQr, said, “Today we’re taking the next step toward our vision of unleashing the potential of the ever-changing cloud and related hybrid IT landscape by entering an agreement to be acquired by Cisco. We share a common vision and great product synergy that drives application relevancy throughout disparate and ever-changing IT environments.”